L'Abbé Jules

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L'Abbé Jules , 1888

L'Abbé Jules is a novel by the French author Octave Mirbeau , which initially appeared as a serial in the satirical magazine Gil Blas and immediately afterwards as a book edition in Paris in 1888by Éditions Charpentier (latest French new edition, with a foreword by Pierre Michel : Éd. de l'Âge d'Homme , Lausanne 2010).

The novel with the title Der Abbé , authorized translation by Ludwig Wechsler, was published in German in 1903 by Wiener Verlag in Vienna , later in the same translation in 1925 by Verlag Martin Maschler and in 1926 by Paul Franke, both in Berlin .

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The novel is about a hysterical priest who, torn between his “demands” for carnal lust and his pursuit of heaven, finds himself in constant rebellion against the Catholic Church and an oppressive society that is stifling life, justice and freedom.

Hermann-Paul, Abbé Jules and Pamphile, 1904

As the setting for the plot, Mirbeau chose a small village in the Norman hilly landscape of Le Perche , a place reminiscent of Rémalard , where he spent his youth: everyone there is constantly exposed to the gaze of everyone and the needs of the body and mind are miserably suppressed .

Suddenly the priest (Abbé Jules), so the beginning of the novel, returns to this place of his childhood after years of absence, which causes a scandal. The story of the last years of his life, which he spends there, is not told continuously, but two long flashbacks about his previous life are inserted, which contain an ominous gap of six years. This gap - about the time the Abbé had spent in Paris - puzzles the villagers, and the reader learns nothing about it either, so that his curiosity remains unsatisfied until the end.

The conclusion, in an experimental form of a posthumous joke on Jules' side, is the opening of his will: in it he bequeaths all his property and property to the priest in his diocese who is the first to give up his clerical status! Then his mysterious suitcase, which has been mentioned again and again, is burned “on a stake” as a final car dairy, whereby it turns out that it was filled with pornographic writings and obscene images, and the sexual frustrations of its owner come to light as a symbol of the imperfectly repressed unconscious.

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Even if the author remembered his own uncle Louis-Amable Mirbeau, a free-spirited priest who died in the arms of his nephew in 1867 when designing the fascinating Abbé Jules, he also gave this figure many traits of himself - e.g. B. his outbursts of temper and conflict, his passion for books and love of nature, his sudden changes between euphoria and depression, his uninhibited way of expression, his desire for deception and deception or his striving for the absolute. In addition, Mirbeau put a number of views in the mouth of his Abbé Jules, which he himself represented: his tragic view of the human condition and his metaphysical rebellion; his nature-loving and Rousseauistic moral system and his liberal rebellion against all oppressive, mutilating and alienating structures of society, namely family , school and church. In doing so, however, the author avoids making his fictional character the mere mouthpiece of himself: He clearly emphasizes all of their contradictions and inadequacies as well as their despicable acts (theft, despotism, attempted rape) as such.

Hermann-Paul, Abbé Jules, 1904

Emphasizing the topics of money and sexual frustration in connection with his novel hero could give the impression that Mirbeau had just delivered another work of the traditional genre of the naturalistic moral novel on the popular theme of the sinful priest. In reality, however, this novel is mainly influenced by Dostoevsky , whose importance Octave Mirbeau first drew attention to in France . Dostoyevsky "revealed" to him the function of the unconscious through the novel The Idiot , and so Mirbeau designed his novel character Abbé Jules for the first time with the means of depth psychology , of which there was no example in France until then.

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