Henry Monnier

Henry Monnier as Monsieur Prudhomme (around 1875), photograph by Étienne Carjat .

Henry Bonaventure Monnier (born June 7, 1799 in Paris , † January 3, 1877 ibid) was a French author , playwright, theater actor , draftsman, illustrator and caricaturist.

Life

Monnier came from a petty-bourgeois background. From 1816 to 1821 he was an employee of the Ministry of Justice (his friend Balzac embodied him in his novel Les employés in the character of Jean-Jacques Bixiou), but also a draftsman and caricaturist. After a stay in England, in 1830, he turned to the theater, in addition to the restless production of lithographs , both as an author and as an actor of his own characters.

The figure of Joseph Prudhomme

Most of Monnier's texts are now forgotten (Monnier is almost absent from literary stories), but one character has survived, Joseph Prudhomme, the immortal embodiment of the French philistine. With her Monnier stands at the beginning of a series that leads via Flaubert (figure of Monsieur Homais in Madame Bovary , further Bouvard and Pécuchet and the dictionary of platitudes ) to the Mediterranean variant in Alphonse Daudet (figure of Tartarin of Tarascon ) and finally to Léon Bloy ( Interpretation of the commonplaces ).

Many of the sayings put into the mouth by Prudhomme are still alive in the French vocabulary. Here are some examples:

• Monsieur Prudhomme sees the sea for the first time. His reaction: "Such a large amount of water borders on the ridiculous" ( Une telle quantité d'eau frise le ridicule .)
• Monsieur Prudhomme is a master of catachresis : Le char de l'État navigue sur un volcan (not translatable, comparable with: "The ravages of time will also let grass grow over this wound.")
• Monsieur Prudhomme receives the saber of the National Guard. His reaction: “This saber is the most beautiful day of my life. With him, I swear, I will support, defend and, if necessary, fight our state system. ”( Ce sabre est le plus beau jour de ma vie: avec lui, je jure de soutenir, de défendre nos institutions et au besoin de les combattre . )
• "That is my opinion and I share it". ( C'est mon avis et je le partage .)
• “It is ambition that is the undoing of people. If Napoleon had remained an artillery officer, he would still be on the throne today ”. ( C'est l'ambition qui perd les hommes. Si Napoléon était resté officier d'artillerie, il serait encore sur le trône .)
• "Whoever removes people from society isolates them". ( Otez l'homme de la société, vous l'isolez .)
• In the Aveyron department, the public prosecutor Fualdès is murdered by unknown persons. Interpretation by Monsieur Prudhomme: "The handle of the knife was in Rome, the point in the Aveyron". ( Le couteau de Fualdès avec son Manche à Rome et sa pointe dans l'Aveyron .)

Recent research emphasizes that these sayings (as with Monsieur Homais) are not simply stupid, but at the same time also show elements of originality, profundity or rhetorical refinement. As a sarcastic but precise observer of human weaknesses during the Biedermeier period (similar to the painter Carl Spitzweg in Germany ), Monnier has recently been increasingly appreciated, reissued and translated into German by Eugen Helmlé in 1982 .

Works

with the figure of Joseph Prudhomme

• Scènes populaires , 1831 (prose, great success)
  • Scènes populaires. Les bas-fonds de la société , ed. by Anne-Marie Meininger, Paris, Gallimard, 1984 (folio 1596)
• La Famille improvisée , 1831 (play, Monnier plays several roles himself, triumph)
• Grandeur et décadence de M. Joseph Prudhomme , 1852 (play, Monnier plays Prudhomme himself, great success)
  • Rise and Fall of Joseph Prudhomme , translated and edited. by Eugen Helmlé , Frankfurt am Main, Publishing House of the Authors, 1982.
• Mémoires de Monsieur Joseph Prudhomme , 1857.
  • ed. by Gilbert Sigaux, Paris, Club Francais du Livre, 1964.
• Monsieur Prudhomme chef de brigands , 1860 (play, failure)

Other fonts (selection)

• La physiologie du bourgeois , Paris, Aubert, 1841.
  • The story of the philistine , Berlin, Juncker, 1919 (German by Hans Pfeifer).
• La religion des imbéciles. Nouvelles scènes populaires , Paris 1861.

literature

• Aristide Marie (1862–1938), Henry Monnier , Paris, Floury, 1931; Geneva, Slatkine, 1984.
• Livia Székely, Henri Monnier et le personnage de Joseph Prudhomme 1799-1877. Contribution à l'étude du "Biedermeier" en France , Kolozsvár 1944 (Etudes françaises. Publiées par l'Institut Français de l'Université de Szeged. 26).
• Edith Melcher, The life and times of Henry Monnier , Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1950.
• Jessie Grace Marash, Henry Monnier. Chronicler of the bourgeoisie , London, Harrap, 1951.
• "Monnier, Henri Bonaventure 1799-1877", in: Dictionnaire de la Littérature française du XIXe siècle , Paris, Encyclopaedia Universalis, Albin Michel, 1998, 2014 (Les Dictionnaires d'Universalis).
• Nathalie Preiss, "Henry Monnier", in: Dictionnaire des écrivains de langue française , ed. by Jean-Pierre Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty and Alain Rey, Paris, Larousse, 2001, pp. 1234–1236.
• Alan Raitt, Gustavus Flaubertus bourgeoisophobus = Flaubert and the Bourgeois mentality , Oxford, Lang, 2005 (Chapter 2: Flaubert, Henry Monnier and Joseph Prudhomme).
• Ursula E. Koch , Pierre-Paul Sagave : Le Charivari. The story of a Paris daily newspaper in the struggle for the republic (1832–1882) . Leske Verlag, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-921490-29-4 , p. 405.

Web links

Wikisource: Henry Monnier  - Sources and full texts (French)

• Literature by and about Henry Monnier in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/celebrations/monnier.htm (Short tribute to the 100th birthday, French)