Paul Le Bourget

See also: Le Bourget

Paul Le Bourget (Amiens, September 2nd 1852 - Paris, December 25th 1935) is a writer French resulting from a family originating in Ardeche (Savas, Peaugres).

Biography

Paul Le Bourget is one of the large novelists of the end of XIXe and the beginning XXe century. The literary critic Pierre de Boisdeffre notices that “which will want to evoke our manners between 1889 and 1914 will have to resort to documents like the novels of Paul Le Bourget”.

One distinguishes two periods from Paul Le Bourget, before and after his return to Catholicism (1901).

Are representative of the first Paul Le Bourget and his talent studied human psychology, without judging it: Cruel enigma , Cosmopolis , Andre Cornélis , Lies - inspired of the martyrdom in love with Octave Mirbeau -, and of the second Paul Le Bourget: the Disciple , the Stage , the Middle-aged lust , Our acts follow us .

Paul Le Bourget however is interested all his life in psychology; he was one of the first to make known Freud in France.

the Disciple (1889) is particularly characteristic of the evolution of Paul Le Bourget; without being still the book of a Christian, this novel puts the concerns morals at the foreground. Paul Le Bourget develops the question of the responsibility lengthily to with it, in particular that of the writer, of the philosopher, person in charge of the consequences of his writings. “Few works of this nature, note Victor Giraud, had on the spirits, the hearts and on the same consciences, similar action, determined similar shock. ” Starting from this novel (and of its famous foreword), Paul Le Bourget is thus made, little by little, plus moralizer that moralist and proposes types of characters, with the sometimes thorough features with the excess, whose acts are analyzed in comparison with morals, generally Christian. Paul Le Bourget will remain then, until his death, faithful to the novel with thesis.

The sententious tone and the positions traditionalists adopted by Paul Le Bourget in his novels attracted many enmities in the literary circle to him, in particular, in the catholic writers, that of Leon Bloy which scorned it cordially.

The action of the novels of Paul Le Bourget generally proceeds over very a short duration (a few days) and the meticulous description of the psychology of the principal characters holds a dominating place to with it. These novels generally have as a framework what Paul Le Bourget names “the world”, i.e. the nobility or the upper middle class, of which it describes manners and them through.

With Henry Bordeaux and Rene Bazin, Paul Le Bourget is one of the “3B”, authors known as of reference for the “traditionalists” of the beginning of the XXe century.

He is elected member of the French Academy in 1894. He is buried with the Cimetière of Montparnasse to Paris.

Works

; Novels ; Tests
  • Tests of contemporary psychology (1883 - 1886)
; In line
  • These works on line at Gutenberg.org

Film adaptation

  • Andre Cornélis , realized by Jean Kemm in 1926, produced by Jacques Haïk, with Claude France and Malcolm Tod.

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