Alain-Fournier

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Alain-Fournier (1913)

Alain-Fournier (actually Henri-Alban Fournier ; born October 3, 1886 in La Chapelle-d'Angillon , Center-Val de Loire , † September 22, 1914 in Les Éparges near Verdun ) was a French writer.

Life and work

Alain-Fournier's birthplace in La Chapelle-d'Angillon

Alain-Fournier (as he called himself - without a first name - as an author) was born in Berry in central France as the first child of a teacher couple. He spent his childhood in the country with his sister Isabel, who was three years younger than him, and when he was 12 he was sent to a “pension” (private school with boarding school) in Paris, where he would then attend a renowned high school, the Lycée Voltaire , and later as a scientist should work. At 15, however, he moved to the Brest grammar school , which led preparatory classes for the French naval school , because he had decided to become a naval officer. At 16 he gave up this idea and graduated from high school in Bourges at 17 .

Then, from October 1903, he attended the preparatory classes for the elite college for teachers (ENS) at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux near Paris. Here he made friends with Jacques Rivière , with whom he began to be interested in literature and to be active (and who became his brother-in-law in 1908).

On Ascension Day 1905, when he was just 19, he had a fleeting encounter with a young woman, Yvonne de Quièvrecourt, with whom he fell madly in love. However, he lost sight of her after another brief meeting and was disappointed to learn two years later that she had meanwhile married. His hopes for a place at the ENS were not fulfilled either: after a third year of preparatory class, now at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand , he was unlucky for the second time in the entrance examination (concours) and had to pursue a career as a high school or even give up university professor.

While his friend Rivière, who had also not received a place at the ENS, went to Bordeaux to take an exam at the university there, with which he could become a salaried high school teacher, Alain-Fournier initially completed his military service (1907-09). While on vacation he visited the pilgrimage site of Lourdes , which impressed him.

At the end of 1907 he published his first longer text under the pseudonym Alain-Fournier: the essay Le Corps de la femme ('The body of women'). In 1909, towards the end of his military service, he too tried to take the Licentia docendi exam in order to be able to become an employed English teacher. Apparently, however, he was ill-prepared and failed.

Back in Paris he worked from April 1910 to 1912 as a freelance literary critic for the Paris-Journal newspaper . During this time he had a very changeable relationship with the milliner Jeanne Bruneau. At the end of 1910 he met the 13-year-old novelist Charles Péguy , who tried to bring him back to the Catholic piety of his childhood. Through him he was given the not too labor-intensive position of private secretary at the banker Claude Casimir-Périer, which he held from 1912.

During these years he wrote the novel that would make him famous: Le grand Meaulnes ( The great Meaulnes ). This first appeared in five sequels from July to November 1913 in the young magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française , where Rivière's brother-in-law had been editorial secretary since the previous year. In the autumn it was also published as a book. The success of the book was immediately remarkable, it was shortlisted for the Prix ​​Goncourt .

At a reunion in 1913 with his great love Yvonne de Q., who meanwhile had two children, Alain-Fournier was able to console himself with the fact that he had recently had a very attractive mistress: the well-known actress Madame Simone , wife of his boss Casimir -Périer. This inspired him to write a new, but unfinished novel entitled Colombe Blanchet (which was only printed posthumously ).

When the First World War broke out on August 1, 1914, Alain-Fournier was drafted as a lieutenant in the reserve. During the fighting at Éparges , south of Verdun, he and his men did not return from a patrol on September 22nd and went missing. It was not until 1991 that his remains were identified in a mass grave thanks to the identification tag and transferred to the Saint-Remy-la-Calonne military cemetery.

The early death of Alain-Fournier was not uninvolved in the enormous circulation that the Grand Meaulnes experienced in the interwar period and afterwards, when it became a cult book for generations of young readers. It was also widely read in Germany and is still available in various transmissions from several publishers.

On September 9, 2014, the asteroid (13534) Alain-Fournier was named after him.

literature

Works

  • Le grand Meaulnes , Roman 1913 (German: The great Meaulnes or, more rarely, The great comrade )
  • Colombe Blanchet , fragment of a novel 1914
  • Miracles , poems

Work editions

  • Le grand Meaulnes , Paris (Garnier) 1986 (contains the novel itself and drafts for it, as well as the poems and stories published in 1925 under the title Miracles )
  • Correspondance Jacques Rivière - Alain-Fournier , Paris (Gallimard) 1991 (contains the correspondence from 1904 to 1914)

biography

  • Isabelle Rivière: Vie et passion d'Alain-Fournier , Monaco (Jaspard) 1963, published by Fayard (Paris) 1989 under the title Alain-Fournier , written by Alain-Fourniers' sister, with excerpts from correspondence with the family
  • Violaine Massenet: Alain-Fournier: biography. Paris (Flammarion) 2005, ISBN 2-08-068173-7 .

Web links

Wikisource: Alain-Fournier  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gert Pinkernell : names, titles and dates of French literature. Part II: 1800 to circa 1960 March 2008, accessed February 24, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 89834
personal data
SURNAME Alain-Fournier
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fournier, Henri-Alban (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH October 3, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH La Chapelle-d'Angillon , Center-Val de Loire
DATE OF DEATH September 22, 1914
Place of death Les Éparges near Verdun