Camille Lemonnier

Career

In 1863, Lemonnier publishes in account of author the Salon of Brussels and starts to attend the artistic world. It is immediately characterized by its desire to defend realistic art against the academism, and the freedom of the artist against the institutions of State. In 1870, Lemonnier traverses the battle field of Sedan with his/her cousin Félicien Rops (painter and draftsman). Its novel-report Sedan will report its impressions: “an odor of ground, rot, chlorine and urine mixed” . This realistic work will be taken again under the title the Mass graves which precedes the Rout by Emile Zola.

Lemonnier starts to be recognized in the naturalist medium. He collaborates besides in French reviews where he makes known the Belgian painters. It is with its novel a Male (1881) that it reaches notoriety. The scandal caused by the publication of this book is such as the young generation (poets gathered around the review the Young person Belgium ) organizes a banquet of “repair” to their elder in 1884 to testify to him its support vis-a-vis the lightnings to the critic traditionalist of the “wigs” and certain catholic journalists.

One often called Lemonnier the “Belgian Zola” although he affirmed that this label was not appropriate to him. In fact, the author of the Mâle is too concerned of his style (which one named “blazing macaque”) and of search of neologisms and archaisms to be arranged among the naturalists. Filiation with the Naturalisme French stops, indeed, with the influence of the medium, and more precisely of the animal life, on the behavior of the characters.

In novels such Had the , the End of the middle-class men or the man in love , Lemonnier is attached more to the current known as “declining”, represented in France by J. - K. Huysmans, Péladan, Jean Lorrain or Rachilde; the preciosity of its style, its obsession for the topic of the femme fatale, the neurosis and perversion can be regarded as an original contribution to declining esthetics. If, in these novels of the years 1890, Lemonnier approaches more Rops, it does not remain about it less than the chapters of the Mâle which describe the village fair or the life with the farm return more to the Flemish tradition and the tables of Pieter Bruegel Old the.

The Quinquennial Price of literature will be allotted to him in 1888 for its work Belgium , illustrated drawn engravings, inter alia, by Constantin Meunier. In 1905, it publishes the Belgian Life and two years before its death, a life of writer , his autobiography. In these three works, Lemonnier pays homage to its native soil, wishing to present to the reader the life and the culture of its country. This “witness with the past”, according to his own expression, reports, with a talent of storyteller, the birth of the Belgian letters: “The Jeune Belgium had struck the arid rock and now water streamed. ” Sometimes lyric, epic and excessive, Lemonnier leaves a very instructive historical document however.

By defining the talent of the Belgian painter like the capacity “to suggest spiritual correspondences by an expressive and significant chromatism” ( Belgian Life ), it also speaks about its own style: it is a question of striking imagination by the color and the images. In that, there is opposed to the imitation of reality and joined a universal symbolism while remaining close to the instinct and the spontaneousness at the same time as of the tradition Baroque of its ancestors (Rubens, Jordaens, Teniers…).

Its work seen by its contemporaries

Stefan Zweig, Emile Verhaeren , 1910:

With this writer [[Charles De Coster]] prematurely dead succeeded Camille Lemonnier, which collected the heavy task and the sad heritage of the first combatants: ingratitude and disillusion. It is still a hero who this proud and noble character. Soldier of the first at the last day, it has fought without truce, for forty years, for the size of Belgium; he has writing delivers on book, created, worked, thrown calls, reversed barriers. He did not know the rest until Paris and Europe did not attach any more to the “Belgian” qualifier the significance scornful of “provincial”, until he became finally, like formerly the name the “gueux one”, of a ashamed term, a true title of honor. Intrepid, ever discouraged by the failure, this marvellous man sang his country, the fields, the mines, the cities, his compatriots, the boys and the girls with ebullient and prompt blood with anger. He sang the burning desire which he tested of a clearer religion, freer, vaster, where our heart would be in more direct communion with great Nature. With the riot of color of its majestic ancestor Rubens, whose merry sensuality made less thing a perpetual festival and enjoyed the life like eternal innovation, Camille Lemonnier knew to paint as a spendthrift any vitality, any heat, any abundance.

Iwan Gilkin, Speech made with the Installation of the royal Academy of Literature, the February 15th 1921:

No writer of the 19th century, if it is not Victor Hugo, had, like Camille Lemonnier, the richnesses of the dictionary, did not lay out to formulate its thought or its feelings of such a considerable number of words: no one was not grayed like him its verbal power. (...) But these are there only the first gifts that nature made him. It granted to him instincts a strange depth, which communient with all the paramount instincts of the life, which feel all the shivers of the animal, all quiverings, all the appetites, all fruitfulness, all the energies unchained in the innumerable multitude of the living organisms.

Antonin Bunand, Small Mondays , 1890:

Its prose swollen carts the rare and invaluable terms, the archaisms and the neologisms, and the words torn off with the jargons of the provinces. There is plethora, and this plethora threatens to burst, so to speak, the skin of the sentence.

Quotations

On its refusal of the labels of literary kind (" Esthétique" , Ladies of Pleasure , 1892):

I refuse to plant only cabbages in my garden; I do not intend to be the cow grazing his grass zone around his stake; I honor, but without envying to resemble to him, the stone breaker dedicated to the maintenance of a departmental ray. In short, when it would be lucrative and convenient for me to confine me, the following the example of others, in a immusable perimeter - (the profitable firms are only at this price), - I escape towards variables latitudes and balks to let me catalog under a label.

Selective bibliography

(Lemonnier is the author of more than 70 volumes)

Our Flemings (1869)
the Living room of Paris (1870)
Sedan (1871)
Gustave Courbet and her work (1878)
a Male (1881)
Death (1881)
the Hysterical (1885)
Cramp-Flesh (1886)
Belgium (1888)
Mrs. Lupar (1888)
the child of the Clamping plate (1888)
Had the (1890)
End of the middle-class men (1892)
the virgin Island (1897)
the Man in love (1897)
Adam and Eve (1899)
In the middle expenses of the forest (1900)
Constantin Meunier (1904) - monograph
When I was man (1907)
Félicien Rops (1908) - monograph
Emile Claus (1908) - monograph
the Belgian School of painting , (1906)
a Life of writer (posth.)

External bonds

a biography of Camille Lemonnier
'' Christmas of the small player of violin '' (1873)
Emile Verhaeren: '' Camille Lemonnier '' (1913).

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