Paul (-Charles Joseph) Bourget

Novelist and critic, born in Amiens, N France. The son of the mathematician, Justin Bourget (1822–87), he began as a poet, and several of his poems were set to music by Debussy. He published a series of brilliant essays tracing the sources of contemporary pessimism to the works of Stendhal, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Taine, and Reman. His early novels include Cruelle Enigme (1885), André Cornélis (1887), and his most important work Le Disciple (1889). A convert to Catholicism, he attacked social problems from a monarchist angle in Le Démon de midi (1901). Among later novels are L'Etape (1902), Un Divorce (1904), and Un Danseur mondain (1925). In later years he became better known for his critical works.

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Paul Charles Joseph Bourget (September 2, 1852–December 25, 1935), was a French novelist and critic.

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He was born at Amiens in the Somme département of France. His father, a professor of mathematics, was later appointed to a post in the college at Clermont-Ferrand, where Bourget received his early education. During 1872–1873 he produced a volume of verse, Au bord de la mer, which was followed by others, the last, Les Aveux, appearing in 1882.

In 1884 Bourget paid a long visit to Britain, where he wrote his first published story (L'Irréparable). In the same year appeared the novel Coeur de femme, and Nouveaux Pastels, "types" of the characters of men, the sequel to a similar gallery of female types (Pastels, 1890). Etudes et portraits, first published in 1888, contains impressions of Bourget's stay in England and Ireland—especially reminiscences of the months which he spent at Oxford;

As a writer of verse Bourget was merely experimenting, and his poems, which were collected in two volumes (1885–1887), are chiefly interesting for the light which they throw upon his mature method and the later products of his art. The habit of close scientific analysis which he derived from his father, the sense of style produced by a fine ear and moulded by a classical education, the innate appreciation of art in all its forms, the taste for seeing men and cities, the keen interest in the oldest not less than the newest civilizations, and the large tolerance not to be learned on the boulevard—all these combined to provide him with a most uncommon equipment for the critic's task. It is not surprising that the Sensations d'Italie (1891), and the various psychological studies, are in their different ways scarcely surpassed throughout the whole range of literature.

Bourget's reputation as a novelist is assured.

Bourget has been charged with pessimism, and with undue delineation of one social class, but there is no despair in his own outlook upon human destiny as a whole. Bourget's writing is singularly graceful. As a critic, either of art or letters, Bourget was outstanding.

Preceded by: Maxime Du Camp

Seat 33 Académie française 1894–1935

Succeeded by: Edmond Jaloux