Paul Bourget

Paul Bourget made his name as a critic before he wrote novels, with essays on Baudelaire, Stendhal and Flaubert that read literature as a symptom of its age. The fiction that followed is psychological in the strict sense: Cruelle Énigme in 1885, Un Crime d'amour the year after, Mensonges in 1887, each turning on what a character will not admit about themselves. Le Disciple, from 1889, is the one that mattered, a case against the determinist philosophy of the day made by showing a young man who takes it seriously and wrecks two lives. Cosmopolis moves among the international set in Rome. The Académie française elected him in 1894, and by then he had become the leading novelist of French conservative Catholic opinion, which is how he was read until the First World War and much of why he was dropped afterwards. Born in Amiens in 1852, he died in Paris on Christmas Day 1935.