Paul Déroulède
Paul Déroulède (born September 2, 1846 in Paris , † January 30, 1914 in Montboron near Nice ) was a French author and politician.
Life
writer
Déroulède initially hoped for a career as a playwright and wrote z. B. 1869 the play Juan Strenner . In 1870 he became a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War and fought in May 1871 on the side of the French government troops in the suppression of the Paris Commune , where he was wounded.
After his recovery, in the face of the French defeat in the war and the loss of Alsace - Lorraine, he developed into a nationalist and revanchist who called for revenge on Germany and preached a spiritual and moral turn in France, which he said of atheism, indifference, lack of will and a corrupting parliamentarism looked decomposed.
With this in mind, he wrote martial and patriotic poems, which he published in the volumes Chants du soldat (songs of the soldier, 1872) and Nouveaux chants du soldat (1875), to which he wrote Marches et sonneries (marches and sounds) in 1881 and Refrains militaires in 1888 (Military rhymes) followed. In addition to his activity as a poet, he also tried his hand at being a dramatist with the plays L'Hetman (1877) and La Moabite (1881), albeit with less success .
politics
After his poetry had earned him the honorary title “le poète national” on the political right, Déroulède also developed political ambition. In 1882 he founded the chauvinist and anti-parliamentary Ligue des Patriotes (Union of Patriots). This supported the revanchist general and ex-war minister Georges Boulanger ("le Général Revanche") in 1888/1889 and called for an armed coup against the newly established parliamentary democracy in 1871, if the necessity so required. In the elections at the beginning of 1889, for which Boulanger ran for and was elected in five constituencies at the same time, Déroulède also made it into parliament as a Boulangist member of parliament. However, when the general neither achieved a parliamentary majority nor attempted an overthrow, but fled to Belgium before the government's arrest warrant (where he committed suicide in 1891 ), Déroulède withdrew from politics for some time in 1892.
In 1894 he published Chants du paysan (songs of the farmer), a praise of the “real”, down-to-earth and earthy France, and in 1895 a drama about the medieval national hero Bertrand du Guesclin , who defeated the English in the Hundred Years War and the territories they occupied for had recaptured the French crown.
When the Dreyfus Affair polarized France in 1898 , Déroulède also became active again, in an obvious way as a nationalist and anti-Semitic "anti-Dreyfusard". After he had been re-elected as a member of parliament, in 1899, after the sudden and scandalous death of President Félix Faure , he tried to incite the French military into a coup against the parliamentary regime. He failed, however, and was sentenced to ten years in exile on January 3, 1900, but pardoned in 1905 after five years of exile in Spain.
In 1906 Déroulède ran again in the parliamentary elections, but was not elected, u. a. because his Ligue des Patriotes had in the meantime received stiff competition from its own ideological camp through the Action française of Charles Maurras . After that, his importance as a politician quickly declined. Even his poetry now appeared to right-wing readers as hollow-sounding, pathetic and outdated.
literature
- Bertrand Joly: Déroulède. L'inventeur du nationalisme français . Perrin, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-262-01331-4 .
- Bertrand Joly (Ed.): Dictionnaire biographique et géographique du nationalisme français (1880-1900). Boulangisme, Ligue des Patriotes, Mouvements antidreyfusards, comités antisémites (= Dictionnaires & références, Vol. 2). Champion, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-85203-786-6 .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Déroulède, Paul |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French author and politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 2, 1846 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 30, 1914 |
| Place of death | Montboron near Nice |