Mirbeau octave

Octave Mirbeau , born the February 16th 1848 with Trévières (Apple-brandy) and dead the February 16th 1917 with Paris, is a writer and Journaliste French

Octave Mirbeau was a European celebrity and great popular successes, while also being appreciated and being recognized by the avant-gardes literary and artistic, which is not common. Influential journalist and extremely well paid, art critic equipped with a very sure taste, dreaded lampoonist, he was also an innovative novelist and a playwright, at the same time traditional and modern, who triumphed over all the large scenes over the world.

Biography

Beginnings

Youth

Grandson of Norman notaries, wire of a doctor of Rémalard, in the Pole, the young Mirbeau Octave makes poor studies with the college of the Jesuits of Vannes, from where it is driven out under conditions more than suspect, than it will evoke in his novel Sebastien Roch. After its baccalaureat, it starts without the least conviction of the studies of right, than it does not complete, and returns in Rémalard, where it works in the notary of the village. Mobilized, it undergoes the war of 1870 in the army of the Loire, and this experiment traumatisante will inspire several tales and of the chapters to him démystificateurs of the Martyrdom and of Sebastien Roch. In 1872, it go up in Paris and makes its journalistic beginnings with the service of the Bonapartists, in the daily newspaper of the Call to the People, the Order of Paris , directed by a customer and close to his/her father, the former deputy Henri Dugué of Fauconnerie, who offered the unhoped-for occasion to him to flee the notarial coffin where it felt locked up. He becomes the private secretary of Dugué and is thus, for this reason, charged to write all that is written at his place: episode which he will remember bitterly in his unfinished novel, published after his death, a gentleman .

Entry in journalism

During a dozen years, the Mirbeau young person thus goes prostituer his feather and to make " the domestique" , as a private secretary, and a " the trottoir" , like he writes it, as a journalist with pledges. Of' access, in the Order of Paris , official body of the Call to the People, Bonapartist, until 1877; then in Ariégeois , with the service of the baron of Saint-Paul, deputy of Ariège, in 1877-1878; then in the Gallic , become monarchist under the direction of Arthur Meyer (1880-1882); and finally, in 1883, pndant six months, in Grimaces , weekly magazine catch-all, anti-opportunist and, alas! anti-semites (but it makes its self-criticism as of on January 14th, 1885 in France ): he is editor association on behalf of the banker Edmond Joubert, vice-president of Paribas (1883), and it intends there to make grimacer the powerful ones, to uncover their turpitudes and to reveal the scandals of the pseudo-Republic, where, according to him, a band of merry escarpes the cases of the State hook with impunity. Paul Hervieu, which collaborates in the Grimaces under the pseudonym of Liris, becomes his friend and his confidant.

With the beginning of the year 1880, Octave Mirbeau makes also " the nègre" and ten volumes, published under several pseudonyms produces, which allow him, not only to earn its living suitably, but more especially to make its ranges and its evidence, while waiting to be able to sign its copy and to sell it advantageously.

The great turning

In 1884, to recover and purge themselves from a passion devastator for a lady of small virtue, Judith Vimmer - experiment which will inspire its first official novel to him, the Martyrdom -, Mirbeau makes retirement for seven months with Audierne, in the Finistere, and purges herself in contact with the Breton sailors and peasants. It is the great turning of 1884-1885: of return in the Parisian press, it starts, tardily and with difficulty, to fly of its own wings and starts its redemption by the verb: it is obviously not a chance if the projected continuation of the Calvaire , ever written, were to be precisely entitled the Redemption .

Consequently it puts its feather at the service of its ethical and esthetic values and starts its large political combats, artistic and literary, which will give of him the indication of a dispenser of justice and a imprecator. It is at the end of 1884 that its long friendship for both starts large gods of heart , Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin.

Dedication

Entry in literature

Mirbeau continues from now on a double career of journalist and writer. Art journalist and critic influential, dreaded and better and better remunerated, he collaborates, successively or in parallel, with France , the Gaulois , the Matin , the Gil Blas , the Figaro , the Echo of Paris , then, during ten years, with the Journal , where he touches 350 francs per article (approximately 1.100 euros). At the same time it starts under its name a career of storyteller ( Lettres of my thatched cottage , 1885) and of novelist: the Martyrdom (1886), which is worth a success of scandal to him, because of the demystificator chapter II on the rout of the army of the Loire during the war of 1870, which makes howl the nationalists and which Juliette Adam refused to publish in the Nouvelle review ; then the Abbot Jules , 1888, and Sebastien Roch , 1890, which is highly appreciated experts and literary avant-garde, but which are neglected by a critic tardigrade and conformist, frightened by their audacities.

It is during this period that it starts its life of couple with Alice Regnault, old théâtreuse, that it marries, shamefully and in catimini, in London, on May 25th, 1887, after two years and half of joining . But Mirbeau is not made any illusion on its chances to enjoy marital happiness, as testifies some a news with the title bitterly ironic, published the shortly after its marriage: Towards happiness . The abyss who, according to him, separates the two sexes forever, irremediably condemns them to painful misunderstandings, incomprehension and loneliness. This experiment will push it, twenty years later, to interpret with its way the relations between Balzac and Evelyne Hanska in Death of Balzac (1907), chapter of the 628-E8 , where he will not seek to establish impossible truth history and which will be used to him above all as discharge system to exhale its bitterness and its frustrations.

Crisis

During the seven years which follow, Mirbeau passes through an interminable moral crisis, where the feeling of its impotence, its questioning of literary forms, in particular of the romantic kind, and its existential pessimism are worsened by a painful marital crisis which perdure - and to which testifies a long news, '' Mémoire for a lawyer '' (1894). It is during this difficult period that it engages in combat anarchistic, that it discovers Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, that he publishes his novel In the sky in serial (but not in volume), and that he writes his first large part, the Bad shepherds , proletarian tragedy deeply pessimistic, which will be created in December 1897 by the two larger media stars of the time, Sarah Bernhardt and Lucien Guitry.

Triumph

With the turning of the century, Mirbeau gains great successes of sales and scandal with the Garden of the torments (June 1899) and the Newspaper of a chambermaid (July 1900), and he knows a world triumph with the theater with the businesses are the businesses (1903), then with the Hearth (1908), two comedies of manners to the vitriol which he arrives, not without evil, to make represent with the Comédie-Française, at the end of two long battles. the 628-E8 is also a success of scandal in November 1907. Its works are translated into many languages, and its reputation and its audience do nothing but grow in all Europe, particularly in Russia, where two editions of its complete works between 1908 and 1912 appear.

Key figure, fears as much as admired, at the same time marginal by its orientations esthetic and social and in the middle of the cultural system dominating that it contributes to dynamite of the interior, it is recognized by its pars like a Master: thus Leon Tolstoï sees it in him the contemporary French great writer, and that which represents best the secular genius of France ; Stephan Mallarmé writes it that it safeguard certainly the honor of the press by making that was spoken always there, was this only once, by him, with which fire, of each work of exception ; Georges Rodenbach sees it in him The Don Juan of the Ideal and Remy de Gourmont the chief of Right by whom will be saved the cursed press , however that Emile Zola greets, in the author of the Journal of a chambermaid , The dispenser of justice who gave his heart to the poor wretches and to suffering of this world .

Residences

. From 1889 to 1892, Mirbeau lived Damps, in the Eure, where Camille Pissarro left four fabrics of its garden. Then, feeling too distant from Paris, he moved with Carrières-sous-Poissy (Seine-et-Oise), where he made of his garden a source of amazement for his visitors. Become rich, it settled in Paris, Delessert boulevard, close to the Trocadéro, then shared a time between its luxurious apartment of the avenue of Wood (current Avenue Foch), where it moved in in November 1901, and it castle of Cormeilles-in-Vexin, bought in 1904 by its wife Alice. In 1909, it was made build a house with Triel-sur-Seine, where it spends its last years, before returning to Paris to approach its doctor, celebrates it professor Albert Robin.

In all its residences, it cultivated its garden passionately, competing with Claude Monet, abundantly received his many friends, in particular Paul Hervieu, its former accomplice of the Grimaces , the painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, and the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and it lovingly collected the works of art of the innovative artists whom he contributed to promote.

Twilight

The last years of the life of Mirbeau Octave are afflicting: almost constantly sick, as from 1908, it is from now on unable to write: it is his/her young friend and successor Leon Werth who must complete Dingo , which appears in 1913. Terrifying the butchery of the First World War completes to despair a man who, in spite of a pessimism often confining with the nihilism, however never ceased betting on the reason of the man and miser on the Franco-German friendship to guarantee peace in Europe (see in particular the 628-E8 , 1907). He dies the day of sound 69e birthday.

Work

Its engagements

Political combats

On the political plan, Mirbeau adopted officially the Anarchisme in 1890. But, well before this date, it was already radically libertarian, savagely individualistic, irréductiblement pacifist, resolutely anticlerical and antimilitarist. It fought with constancy against all the forces of oppression, exploitation and alienation: the family, the school, the Catholic church and religious beliefs, the army and warmongering, the venal and anesthetic press, industrial and financial capitalism, the colonial conquests, which transform whole continents into gardens of the torments, and the middle-class political system, which is claimed wrongly republican, whereas it does nothing but ensure the seizure of a minority on all the country, with the blessing of the voters moutonniers, more animals that animals : also invites it its readers to make the strike of the voters (its article, thus entitled, was published in Le Figaro on November 28th 1888 and was diffused to hundreds of thousands of specimens through Europe; it is accessible in several languages on Internet,).

Effective and all the more dreaded lampoonist, Mirbeau implements an irony démystificatrice, a black humor disturbing and a rhetoric of the absurdity. He resorts readily to the imaginary interview of powerful of this world, in order to better reveal their mediocrity and their turpitudes. An anthology of its articles was published under the title of Political combats

Ethical combat

Burning supporter of Dreyfus, it engages with passion in the large combat for the cardinal values of the dreyfusism, the Truth and Justice (1898-1899). It writes the text of the petition of the intellectuals, which appears on January 16th, 1898; he collaborates in the Dawn of August 1898 in June 1899; he takes part in multiple public meetings in Paris and in province, with the risk, sometimes, to be made tabasser by the nationalists and anti-semites, as with Toulouse and Rouen; and, on August 8th, 1898, it pays its pocket the large fine of an amount of 7.525 francs (with the expenses of the lawsuit), to which was condemned Emile Zola for his I show , appeared on January 13rd in the Dawn .

Octave Mirbeau incarnates the intellectual with whom nothing of what is human is foreign. Conscious of its responsibility for listened journalist and prestigious writer, it carries out before a whole ethical combat and, if it engages in the businesses of the city, it is in all independence with regard to the parties, and quite simply because it cannot support the idea to be accessory, by its silence, like so much of others by their passivity, of all the crimes which are perpetrated throughout the world. Its duty is above all to be lucid and to force us to see what, blind volunteers, we generally prefer to avoid looking at opposite, history to preserve our moral comfort.

Esthetic combat

In parallel, as an critic art influential and equipped with a species of prescience, it pourfend academic art and fireman, turn into ridiculous the system of the Living rooms and battle for the large innovative artists, made fun a long time and ignored: he is the appointed cantor of Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, the admiror of Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir, the defender of Eugene Carrière, Paul Gauguin - which, thanks to its eulogistic articles, can pay its voyage to Tahiti -, of Felix Vallotton, Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, the discoverer of Maxime Maufra, Constantin Meunier, Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Claudel, Aristide Maillol and of Maurice Utrillo. Its articles on art were collected in two large volumes of its esthetic Combats , published at Séguier in 1993.

Literary combat

It carries out also the good combat for also innovative writers: it launches in particular Maurice Maeterlinck in 1890 and Marguerite Audoux in 1910; it defends Remy de Gourmont, Marcel Schwob, Leon Bloy, Jules Renard; it comes to assistance of Alfred Jarry and Paul Léautaud; he admires unconditionally Leon Tolstoï and Dostoïevski, which revealed to him the limits of art Latin, made clearness and of measurement; he takes the defense of Oscar Wilde condemned to the forced labors; and it contributes to the reception in France of Knut Hamsun and Ibsen.

Named member of the Academy Goncourt by the testamentary will of Edmond de Goncourt, which it has defended several times in the press, Mirbeau makes hear its voice and fights with enthusiasm, as from 1903, for young original writers whom it contributes to promote, even if they do not obtain the Goncourt price: Paul Léautaud, Charles-Louis Philippe, Emile Guillaumin, Valery Larbaud, Marguerite Audoux, Neel Doff, Charles Vildrac and Leon Werth. Its chronicles on the literature and journalism were collected in 2006 in its literary Combats , the Age of Man, Lausanne.

Mirbeau novelist

Négritude with the autobiographical novel

Mirbeau initially advanced masked and published under pseudonym, for several silent partners, ten written novels as negro (five of them are accessible on Internet, the site of the editions of the Butcher, in particular the Rider , 1882, the Marshal's wife and the Beautiful Mrs Vassart , 1884). It made brilliantly its ranges there, varies the models of which it is inspired and registered its accounts within the framework of novel-tragedies, where the destiny takes the form of the psychological and sociocultural determinism. And, already, it traces a table with the vitriol of it devouring wolf that is the world , and of good company that he abhors to have attended it during a dozen years.

He makes, in the romantic kind, of the crashing to pieces official beginnings, under his own name, with a novel which obtains a success of scandal, the Martyrdom (1886), where he releases himself by the writing from the traumatisms from his destroying passion for Judith, renamed Juliette, at the same time as, in chapter II, he draws a pitiless picture of the French Army during the war of 1870, qu' he lived, like moblot (mobile) in the Armed with the Loire.

In 1888, it publishes the Abbot Jules , first novel dostoïevskien and pre-freudien of our literature, highly admired by Leon Tolstoï, Georges Rodenbach, Guy of Maupassant and Theodore de Banville, where, within the framework Percheron of its childhood, two attractive characters appear: the Jules abbot and the Pamphile father. In a third autobiographical novel, Sebastien Roch (1890), it evacuates another traumatism: that of its stay among Jesuits of Valves - a hell , he in 1862 with his confidant Alfred Bansard - and of sexual violences wrote which it could have undergone well there, following the example character éponyme. He thus transgresses a taboo which still lasted a century: the rape of teenagers by priests

The crisis of the novel

It crosses then serious attack existential and literary, during which it publishes nevertheless in serial extraordinary novel, very black and pre-existentialiste before letter, on suffering of human condition and tragedy of artist, In sky , where he puts in scene a painter directly inspired of Van Gogh, from which he comes to buy the Iris and the Sunflowers with the Tanguy father, at the knowledge of his wife…

The shortly after the Business Dreyfus, its pessimism is reinforced, and it publishes two novels end-of-century which testify some. Judged scandalous by the Sanctimonious hypocrites and them right-thinking people of any hair, they are not of them less one enormous success throughout the world (they are translated in about thirty languages and are constantly republished in all the countries): the Garden of the torments (1899) and the Newspaper of a chambermaid (1900). It already puts at evil the romantic kind at it, as a practitioner the technique of joining, and by transgressing the codes of probability, romantic credibility and the hypocrites proprieties. the 21 days of a neurasthenic (1901) systematizes joining and a vision squeaking of the men and the company gives us, through the glance of a neurasthenic who projects his discomfort on a universe where nothing rhyme with nothing and where any walk with wrong way of justice and good sense.

The setting with died of the novel

Octave Mirbeau completes to put at dead the old allegedly realistic novel in its two last narrative works, the 628-E8 (1907), which is presented in the form of an account of voyage in car through Belgium, Holland and Germany, and Dingo (1913), whose heroes are not other than his own car (famous the Charron registered 628-E8 ) and its own dog tenderly loved, Dingo, died with Veneux-Nason in November 1901. Mirbeau gives up the subterfuges of the romantic characters and puts itself in scene as a writer, thus inaugurating a form of Autofiction before the letter. It gives up any romantic screen and any composition, and obeys only its imagination. Lastly, without the least concern for Realism, it multiplies the caricatures, the effects of enlargement and them henaurmities for better opening the eyes to us. Thus one can include/understand the scandalous chapter of the 628-E8 on the Death of Balzac , where some critical wanted to see a vulgar calumny against Mrs. Hanska, whereas it does not act, for the novelist, to express his clean gynécophobie and to exorcize its own frustrations.

Over the codified novel of the 19th century with realistic claims, Mirbeau joins again with the total freedom of the novelists of the past, of Rabelais to Sterne, of Cervantès to Diderot, and he announces those of the {S|XX|E}}.

Mirbeau playwright

A proletarian tragedy

With the theater, Mirbeau made its beginnings with a proletarian tragedy on a subject close to that of the Germinal of Emile Zola, the Bad shepherds , who was created with the theater of the Rebirth, on December 15th, 1897, by two superstars of the scene, Sarah Bernhardt and Lucien Guitry. Pessimism confines there with the nihilism: with the outcome, no hope of future germinations remains. Mirbeau will judge its part too much déclamatoire and will even think of erasing it list of its works.

Two large comedies

In 1903, he knows a world triumph, in particular in Germany and Russia, with a large traditional comedy of manners and characters in the tradition of Molière, which he made represent with the Comédie-Française at the end of a long battle marked by the removal of the reading panel, in October 1901: the businesses are the businesses . It is there that the character emblematic of Isidore Lechat appears: type of the modern big businessman, produced of a new world, ancestor of the Bernard Tapie and Berlusconi, it makes money of all and extends its tentacles on the world.

In 1908, after a new battle, legal and media, that it gains brave fight, it again makes represent with the Comédie-Française a part with scandal, the Hearth , where it pourfend once again alleged charity and transgresses a new taboo: economic and sexual exploitation of teenagers in a hearth allegedly charitable

Jokes and moralities

Mirbeau also made play six small parts in an act, extremely innovative, collected under the title of Farces and moralities (1904): while being located in the continuity of medieval moralities at teaching intentions and moralisatrices, it anticipates the theater of Bertolt Brecht, of Marcel Aymé, Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco. It subverts there the social norms, it demystifies the law and it carries the dispute on the level of the language, which contributes to ensure the domination of the middle-class (it turns in particular in derision the speech of the politicians and the language of the love)

Posterity

Forever forgotten Mirbeau and forever ceased being published, but one often badly read it, through misleading grids of reading (for example, number of critics and historians of the literature embrigadé it well in spite of him among the naturalists, or one wanted to see in several of his novels of erotic works, as testify some many covers of its innumerable translations. One also tended annoyingly to reduce his immense production to the three titles emblématiques of his literary work. Politically incorrect, socially irremediable and literarily unclassable, it crossed, after its death, one long period of incomprehension on behalf of the authors of handbooks and literary stories; and the forgery Political legacy written by Gustave Herve and published five days after its death by its abusive widow, Alice Regnault, contributed to scramble its image durably.

Fortunately, since about fifteen years, thanks to the development of the studies mirbelliennes (publication of its biography, publication of very many news, foundation of the Company Mirbeau Octave, creation of the Cahiers Octave Mirbeau , organization of many international symposiums and interdisciplinary (seven between 1991 and 2007), constitution of Funds Mirbeau Octave at the College library of Angers, opening of two Internet sites devoted to Mirbeau), one discovers it under one day new, one reads it without preconceived ideas nor reducing labels, one publishes the totality of his work, whose whole pieces were ignored or ignored, even completely unsuspected (his novels written like negro, for example), and one tardily starts to take the measurement of his temperament of exception, of his originality of writer and the eminent role which he played on the political scene, literary and artistic of the Belle Time, like in the evolution of the literary kinds.

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