Paul Bourget

Paul Bourget (Amiens, 1852 - Paris, 1935) was a French novelist, essayist and critic who wrote in French. Elected to the Académie Française in 1894, he is remembered above all for his psychological novels and for his so-called novels of ideas, in which he examined the moral consequences of intellectual positions. His name now appears more often in literary histories than on bookshop shelves, yet his influence on French fiction between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was considerable.

Born into a modest family, Bourget began studying medicine before leaving it to devote himself to letters. His father taught mathematics, and the family settled in Clermont-Ferrand, where Bourget spent much of his childhood and youth. He first made his name with poetry and criticism. His Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), portraits of writers of his day, won him a reputation among readers of literary reviews. Fiction followed: Cruelle énigme (1885), Un crime d'amour (1886), André Cornélis (1887) and Mensonges (1887), the last one loosely based on the life of Octave Mirbeau.

Bourget's work sits between psychological observation and moral reflection. At a time when naturalism was losing ground, he wrote fiction focused on feeling and passion among the upper and educated middle classes. His characters, often women in conflict and young men adrift, suffer more from their own weaknesses than from social structures. His best-known novel, Le Disciple (1889), shows how the ideas of a materialist philosopher can push an admiring young man towards tragedy. Around those years he moved away from the agnosticism he had embraced and gradually returned to Catholicism, a process completed in 1901. His later novels took a more moralistic and conservative tone, as in L'Étape (1902) and Un divorce (1904), the latter a defence of the Catholic position against divorce.

Critics have noted that his writing became more repetitive over time and leaned more on craft than on inspiration. His friend Maurice Barrès, who was not sparing with irony, mocked him for retelling the same story again and again. Bourget also wrote a great deal of criticism and essays, on subjects ranging from Renan to Balzac, Flaubert and Taine, and his travel books, such as Sensations d'Italie (1891), are valued for their sharp eye.

His legacy is mixed. He was labelled a Christian Zola and the father of academic writing, tags that do not fully fit him. His main mark lies in the French psychological novel, which learned from him to attend closely to the inner lives of its characters. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also read his Essais and took from them the idea of décadence, which he later used in his final productive period. His novels are rarely read outside specialist circles today, but they remain a useful route into French literature of the Third Republic.