Rene Barjavel is a writer and Journaliste French born the January 24th 1911 with Nyons (Drome). It is deceased the November 24th 1985 with Paris.

Rene Barjavel is mainly known for his science fiction novels. Certain topics frequently return there: fall of civilization caused by excesses of the Science and the Folie of the Guerre, character eternal and indestructible of the Amour ( Ravage , the Great Secrecy , Mists of time , a pink with the paradise ). Its writing wants to be Poétique, Onirique and, sometimes, Philosophique. It also approached in remarkable tests the empirical and poetic interrogation on the existence of God (in particular, Hunger of the tiger ), and it direction of the action of the man on Nature. This author remains extremely popular a quarter century after his disappearance.

Biography

“ Me I am a plowman. Even not: I dig my way mound with mound, I meet a worm, a daisy, a stone, and each time, I look at if God is not hidden behind ”

He is born in 1911, in Nyons, in Drome country-woman. His/her father baker mobilized for the war. His/her mother the substitute, it has only little time to devote to him and the child alone discovers nature and is filled with wonder at his wonders. He plunges himself in the literature, grows in the love of a mother grabbed by work, and the affection of his cousin, Nini. This glance of serious child in his memory of the intense memories which it reflects in his autobiography the blue Cart . This one is before all the echo of its childhood, and leaves little place to its adult life. His/her mother dies in 1922, of the continuations of the Maladie of the sleep. This early disappearance will leave the eleven year old child disabled.

Barjavel said not to have kept any melancholy of its childhood, it is because it did not very lose any, of ceaseless happiness to live until the strong images of the simplest things, which are miraculous, and eternal “ She watched for again, motionless dragon, in the center of its rosette, above black water. I believe that it remained years there. It is there perhaps still ”. It stuck not to lose of it the naivety which preserves discomfort of the adulthood.

Any occasion is favourable for him to cultivate its happiness. In the outdatedness of its apartment, which it chose of the balcony by looking at the sky, the life is not always simple, but even the most difficult situations are occasions to benefit from it “ My friend the tax collector forwards to me a pink ticket. It is the “last opinion before seizure”. In spite of the few installments which I paid, it remains to me to pay an alarming sum. Of course, I do not have what to pay it. I will test a new installment. It appears that it has the right to seize even in the absence of the taxpayer. It would however not be necessary that, ghost of holidays, we find the house empty! … Oh! and then, after all! That would simplify our existence. We were much more at ease before buying the cupboard ”.

At the school, it is poor schoolboy, dedicated to the succession of his father. Abel Boisselier, French professor, notice his qualities in this matter and exhorts it to continue its studies. His/her father cannot ensure him, and the professor makes some its protected and collects it. Rene follows it when it is named headmaster with Cusset and he becomes boarder. The baccalaureat which it makes a success of in 1927 closes its studies which it cannot continue, fault of financial means. It starts a series of small trades, (supervisor of college, English professor, bank clerk…). At eighteen years, he is engaged with the daily newspaper " Progress To combine it " and its career of journalist starts. It meets the editor Robert Denoël during an interview and this one the recruiting. It thus arrives at Paris in 1935 and works as packer at Denoël. It will climb the levels of the hierarchy of the publisher to finish directing arts person. It attends there many personalities of the literary world of which Lanza del Vasto and Jean Anouilh, with which it founds the literary review " the News saison" in 1936.

Married in 1936, father of Renee (Nanou) and Jean in the two years which follow, it forges, with the diseases which attack the child-babies, its broad topics on the Life and medicine, those of the Hunger of the tiger . He saw the war badly that he makes in the Zouave S, and develops a leaning antimilitarist. He is revolted by the slavery of the soldier and the military silly thing. Of return among his in Paris which it will not leave any more, it publishes its first novel, Ravage . He saw, only, the release of the capital where the Germans in escape clash, the young idealists of the maquis and neighbors become retributive. He does not escape vagueness from suspicion which agitates the thoughts of the time, but his/her friends writers bleach it charge of Collaboration carried against him. Robert Denoël does not have this chance, and when the committee of purification dislocates it its functions, Barjavel directs in fact the publisher until the assassination of the editor on December 2nd, 1945.

After the war, it interferes the activities with journalist, critic, novelist and scenario writer. The lack of money and the failure of the Devil carries it are an incipient rupture with its career of novelist, it ventures in the Cinéma. The financial Tuberculosis and its gaps prevent it from carrying out Barabbas , for which God was only a time. Adapter, dialogist, the cinema will not keep an outstanding passage of it, in spite of its major print in many films, whose Don Camillo , the Poor wretches (of Jean-Paul Chanois), the ragmen of Emmaüs , the World's wonder , the Cheetah , etc With the Hunger of the tiger , it believes to crown its career, the tone and the conclusion keeps this mark of it, but it is Demain the Paradise , otherwise more optimistic, which finishes work of the author who will have lived a formidable revival since this test, which in addition preserves its choice place. In the foreword of this work, it mentions how Dr. Paul Carton, thanks to his extraordinary natural medicine, allowed him to raise his children without health accident. Whereas it came to consult the doctor for an otitis from which his/her child suffered, Dr. Carton declared to him: “ Sir, you are an assassin! ”. He explained then the action to be taken to him not to more be confronted with such preoccupations with a health, which Rene Barjavel successfully implemented.

With Mists of time , appeared in 1968, start her career of popular great writer, like had envisaged it the astrologer Olenka de Veer whom it met two years before. He is made chronicler with the Sunday newspaper (the free remarks of Rene Barjavel, which will be collected in the Years of the moon , the Years of freedom and the years of the man ), and complete its work in the spirit which will exceed from now on all the pessimistic slopes, that of the hope.

During the summer 1985, it is victim of a banal aggression in the subway. A jet of bomb car defense in the face, like that, randomly. A free and stupid gesture which quickly will lead it towards death. A last emission with France Inter, at the end of October.

He dies on November 24th, 1985. In 74 years, he will have traversed the eleven months of the year of his life: without to have brought the answers to the great questions and anguishes of the Hunger of the tiger , which never left it, it nevertheless built a whole model of life, found the amazement of its childhood, and, author philanthropic among all, adopted a tolerant position and of compassion. Even in its advanced age, it did not cease writing, to sign most beautiful of its works.

Topics

“ I am devoured by a Curiosité which will be never satisfied, I would like all to know and all to see. And by a perpetual Anxiety concerning the fate of those and what I like. And I like all ”

Rene Barjavel, the large old one of science French fiction

At the time (1942) where it publishes its first two fantastic novels, Barjavel has the appearance of a precursor in the desert which is then the Science French fiction. The American science fiction unloads indeed massively only in the years of post-war period with the chewing gums and the cigarettes, and it will still take long years before names like Isaac Asimov, Clifford Donald Simak or even the ancestor Howard Philips Lovecraft are known by than some bitten more, amateurs of a literature considered as “mass” by the literary Establishment.

Science fiction, kind to which belong indisputably the first large novels of Barjavel which appear during the occupation ( the imprudent Traveller and Ravage ), does not exist then almost in France, if not in a form which one could describe as “bottom-of-the-range”. Just like one spoke about “scientific novel” at Jules Verne, one speaks about “extraordinary novel” at Barjavel, but not about science fiction. The term is not used yet. Nevertheless, in these two novels written and published in a Anglo-Saxon hexagon then world cup, it misses certain traditional topics, even certain commonplaces of the American science fiction to come (Barjavel is unaware of the extraterrestrial ones, the robots, the supermen, the space voyages by rocket or the feeling reluctant “Martians”). Poutant it develops to with it already typical ideas of the surge of the years 1950: Apocalypse, end of the world, voyage in time, return to ascribable cruelty and other catastrophes with invading technology.

Barjavel, although dissociating literature of the time by its fantastic topics, is also a writer of its time. One sometimes wanted to distinguish in Ravage (1943) an echo of the idea Pétain ist of the return to the ground and mistrust towards the urbanization of a France still mainly rural. Barjavel will be seen in this respect reproaching its signature in various newspapers of collaboration such I am everywhere and Gringoire . It will give up quickly nevertheless this vein collaborationnist following the success of Ravage . It described there, with an acute sense of the satire, a technological civilization of the 21e century (the action is in 2052), rather evocative drawings of Le Corbusier and illustrations of Science and Vie (even of the Lépine contest…), brought back to the Neolithic era by the sudden disappearance of the electricity, which brutally puts an end to mechanization. An appalling social decomposition follows, where the brutality and the law of the strongest re-appear in the mégapoles in preys with the flames and the famine: one is in full film catastrophe before the letter.

If Barjavel clearly seems to be wary of progress (in particular in the final scene, where the new king of a world returned technically to the agricultural Middle Ages fulminates against reinvent of a steam engine however very primitive), these concerns were very present at the time (cf: France Against the Robots, of Bernanos, or the supposed catastrophe to threaten the “modern world” according to Guénon). The continuation of its work however showed that he was not opposed to progress, quite to the contrary, so much so that this scene rather seems a satire of the obscurantism.

One includes/understands the reserves of a man of the ground in front of the rural migration which was going to intensify until in the years 1970 and to transform the irreversible French company of manner: Isn't devastation dedicated by the author “to my country grandfathers”?

The Imprudent Traveller is much less “committed”, it is a chief of work of pure imagination and humorous cruelty which precedes moreover the years 1950 in the exposure by what one calls the “temporal paradox”. One often forgets moreover that two works are bound, the very remote future world which visit the traveller of time being the continuation of the catastrophe of 2052. Barjavel exposes a “biological” vision to it future of humanity, amusing and delirious illustration of the evolutionary theses, its voyage in year 100.000 not being, in this respect, without recalling year 802.701 of the H.G. Wells of the Machine to explore time.

With the Devil carries it (1948), the science fiction barjavelienne américanise a little, since the topic of the 3rd world war, with leaving an appalling conflict finished in the atomic flames carrying end of the world, will be one of the favorites of the American SF (Dr. Bloodmoney, of Philip K. Dick, the Shortly after the Machine, To stripe, I am a legend, of Richard Matheson, etc) in an alive world from now on under the threat of an Russo-American warlike apocalypse. But there still the black humor cruelest second anticipation, and the means which humanity employs for autodétruire are far from being limited to the nuclear weapons. It cannot be prevented either, there still, through the absurdity robotization of “civilized unknown” or the skids of industrial agriculture (the giant hen devouring a football stadium), to make fun with cruelty of the drifts, very current, of the handling of the alive one.

Barjavel will go until considering that humanity obtained the atomic bomb by instinct Malthusian of limitation of the demographic explosion, thesis exposed in the Hunger of the tiger on a philosophical tone voltairien to the “second degree” devastator.

Years 1960 will very see Barjavel in phase, more or less consciously, with the ideas of May 1968, (Ways of Katmandou) which it evokes even before they are expressed, in poignant the " Harms of the temps" (or the topic of the all-out war is again exploited), like in the Great Secrecy, or one discovers Barjavel definitely favorable to the sexual release and rather libertarian. It is also one of the rare authors of SF (with Arthur C. Clarke in the City and the Stars) to have treated thoroughly and speculative the topic of immortality.

In Open letter with the alive ones which wants to remain it, Barjavel makes a clear decision against the civilian nuclear, which is little known today.

Nevertheless, Barjavel cannot be classified politically, one can even say (the relationship between Russian Leonova and American Hoover in the mists of time illustrates it with wonder) that he is the apolitical writer par excellence.

From a stylistic point of view, Barjavel survives clearly the top of the production of SF, Frenchwoman or not. It is one of the rare authors not to have regarded the SF as a literature unworthy of the quality required of the “standard” literature, and from this point of view, the authors of SF which can be compared with him are very few - in particular Frank Herbert or Ray Bradbury.

Works

See too

External bonds

• Barjaweb: site devoted to Barjavel, biographies, studies of the majority of its works, approaches set of themes of the whole of work.

• a biography, a bibliography as well as the summary of some works on the site Biblioweb
• site devoted to Rene Barjavel: biography, list of works Rene Barjavel .com
• total Cinema, full text

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