Maxime Du Camp
Maxime Du Camp (born February 8, 1822 in Paris , † February 8, 1894 in Baden-Baden , Germany) was a French writer , journalist and photographer.
life and work
Maxime Du Camp was and is a kind of shadow figure in French history. He was born on February 8, 1822 in Paris into a wealthy Spanish family. Du Camp traveled to the Orient as a young man . Politically active, he was involved in the February Revolution of 1848 , fought against the insurrection in June of the same year and was honored and praised for it. At first Du Camp mainly worked as a writer and journalist, he went on trips to Brittany and the Orient and wrote about them. In addition, he was also interested in the new technique of photography, which then brought him back to the area around the Nile.
Exoticism has played an important role since the end of the 18th century . The French government commissioned Du Camp in 1849 with a large-scale expedition along the Nile . After Jean-François Champollion's expedition , Egypt in particular, as an important source of culture, had a strong appeal to French scholars and artists. They were followed by the first photographers who systematically catered for the scientific appetite for images. Before he set off on his trip to Egypt, Du Camp took lessons from the eminent photographer Gustave Le Gray . Du Camp and his companion Gustave Flaubert returned to France in 1851. They brought back over 220 paper negatives from their photographic excursion. Du Camp settled in Paris as a freelance writer . In addition to poems and novels, several photographic works about Africa and the Middle East were created as an evaluation of the expedition; z. B. "Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie" (1852) and "Le Nil, Égypte et Nubie" (1854).
After his return from North Africa in 1851, he co-founded the Revue de Paris . In the following six years he actively worked on the revue, which gave young authors the opportunity to be published for the first time. The article by Charles Baudelaire on Edgar Poe and the publication by Flaubert's Madame Bovary are best known from the Revue de Paris, which is mainly directed by Du Camp.
As a writer, his political views were easily influenced and very volatile. As a revolutionary from 1848, he joined the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860 and marched to Sicily under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi . Back in France he began with his work Les convulsions de Paris ( The convulsions of Paris ), in which he described his view of the uprising of the Commune . Although this story was based on official (police) sources, it was by no means neutral. When the first volume was published in 1875, a controversial discussion was sparked which - in an extremely emotional way - only ended with the death of Du Camp. He also campaigned for a secular compulsory school and for better living conditions in prisons.
He also published several "politically harmless" works, such as the volumes of poetry Chants modern and Les Convictions and the novels Mémoires d'un suicide and Les six aventures (1857). At the beginning of his journalistic career he wrote regularly for the newspaper Journal des Débats , later he switched to the Revue des Deux Mondes and became one of the most important authors there. In 1880 he was accepted into the Académie française . While his work Les convulsions de Paris was his best-known, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie is his most important book. In it Du Camp described the material and spiritual life of the cosmopolitan city in its century.
He died on the day of his 72nd birthday, on February 8, 1894 in Germany.
Publications
- Egypt, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie (1852)
- Le Nil, Égypte et Nubie (1877)
- Souvenirs et paysage d'Orient (1848)
- Les convulsions de Paris (1875/79, 4 vol.)
- Chants modern. Poems (1860)
- Les convictions. Poems (1858)
- Chants de la matière. Poems (1860)
- Memoires d'un suicide. Novel (1853)
- Les six aventures. Novel (1857)
- L'homme au bracelet d'or. Novel (1862)
- Les buveurs de cendre. Novel (1866)
- L'eunuque, moeurs musulmanes. Novel (1856)
- Orient et Italie (1868, travel memories)
- Les ancètres de la commune. L'attentat Fieschi (1877)
- Histoire et critique. Études sur la révolution française (1877)
- Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie (1869/75, 6 vols.)
- Souvenirs littéraires (1882–83, 2 vols.). En collaboration avec
- La charité privée à Paris (1884; German, Hannov. 1884).
-
Par les champs et les grèves (Voyage en Bretagne) en collaboration with Gustave Flaubert (1886).
- German by Cornelia Hasting: About fields and beaches. A trip to Brittany . Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2016.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michel Frizot (ed.): New history of photography. Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-8290-1327-2 .
- ^ Gérard de Senneville: Maxime Du Camp. A spectateur engaged du XIXe siècle. Paris, Éditions Stock, 1996, ISBN 2-234-04608-4 . P. 8.
- ↑ Two hands write more in FAZ from May 19, 2016, page R4.
literature
- Gérard de Senneville: Maxime Du Camp. A spectateur engaged du XIXe siècle. Paris, Éditions Stock, 1996, ISBN 2-234-04608-4
- Thomas Tilcher: The oriental dream of the generation of writers from 1848. Maxime Du Camp, man of letters and vagabond (= Studia Romanica. H. 64). Winter, Heidelberg 1985, ISBN 3-533-03734-7 (also: Heidelberg, Univ., Diss., 1985).
Web links
- Maxime Du Camp at Google Arts & Culture
- Literature by and about Maxime Du Camp in the catalog of the German National Library
- Image of a bust of him made by James Pradier
- Short biography and list of works of the Académie française (French)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | You camp, Maxime |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French writer, journalist and photography pioneer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 8, 1822 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 8, 1894 |
| Place of death | Baden-Baden , Germany |