Jules Champfleury

See also: Champfleury

Jules François Felix Husson , known as Fleury , known as Champfleury , is a writer French born with Laon, in the Aisne, the September 10th 1821 and died with Sevres the December 6th 1889.

The autodidact

Resulting from a modest milieu, Champfleury must stop its studies very young person, for financial reasons. Once arrived at Paris, it earns its living like employee in a bookseller and launches out as of 1844 in the literary life.

The defender of realism

Journalist, Critic art, playwright, short story writer and novelist, it binds friendship with Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, while attracting himself the hostility of the Frères Goncourt, with which it stigmatizes the " Mannerism ". Concerned to be avenged for its attacks, Goncourt then reproach him an approximate orthography and a " miss style". They will go until caricaturing it in their novel Charles Demailly , devoted to the intellectual middle of their time.

The novels and news of Champfleury stick to the description Réaliste of the lower middle class and the Bohemian one. Cofounder of the review Realism , it publishes a proclamation in favor of the true art in the fields as well literary and as artistic. Admiror of the brothers the Dwarf, ancestors of realism, as well as Gustave Courbet, it devotes many studies to these painters. In the same way, its press articles carry the mark of its admiration for Balzac.

The expert in cats and earthenware

While continuing its career of man of letters, Champfleury specializes in the art of earthenware and seems an authority soon on the matter. In 1872, it is named preserving museum of Sevres, before becoming administrator of the national Manufacture of Sevres, station which it will occupy until his death, seventeen years later. Itself large Collector, it is ironical about its own mania in an autobiographical novel, the earthenware Violin.

However, its greater literary success remains the Cats: history, manners, observations, anecdotes , published by the editor J. Rothschild in 1869 and illustrated inter alia by drawings of Delacroix, Purple-the-Duke, Mérimée, Manet and Hokusai. This work knew an immediate triumph and became a great classic.

Its family

His/her older brother, the scholar Edouard Fleury, was the writer of the Journal of Aisne (born in Laon on September 7th, 1815, died with Vorges, Aisne, on July 4th, 1883).

External bonds

  • Obituary of his/her brother
  • Two news of Champfleury: '' Confessions of Sylvius: Bohemian in love the '' (1857); '' Lucky finds of Mr. Bretoncel '' (1889).

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