Paul Hervieu

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Paul Hervieu
Paul Hervieu

Paul Ernest Hervieu , (born September 2, 1857 in Neuilly-sur-Seine , † October 25, 1915 in Paris ) was a French novelist and playwright. He was considered one of the leading exponents of the naturalistic theses drama.

Life

Hervieu was the offspring of a wealthy upper-class family. He studied law, but also sought contact with writers such as Leconte de Lisle , Paul Verlaine and Alphonse Daudet . After graduating in 1877, he first practiced in a law firm. 1879 qualified for the diplomatic service and was supposed to take up a post in the French embassy in Mexico in 1881 . He preferred, however, to stay in France, where he attended literary and sophisticated salons and became acquainted with artists and writers such as Marcel Proust , Paul Bourget , Henri Meilhac , Ludovic Halévy , Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Degas . On the recommendation of his friend Octave Mirbeau , he tried his hand at being a journalist.

Hervieu wrote for Figaro and the monarchist Gaulois . He took over the management of the newspaper Le Republicain de Seine-et-Marne and worked under the pseudonym Liris with Mirbeau, Alfred Capus and Étienne Grosclaude (1858-1932) on the short-lived satirical magazine Les Grimaces . In 1884 he collected the stories and satires he published there under the title La Bêtise parisienne . His first novel, Diogène-le-Chien , was published as early as 1882 and was praised primarily by Maupassant and Anatole France . He wrote sketches, articles and stories for newspapers and published several other novels. With his first play, Les Paroles Restant , which was performed in 1890, he gave up novel writing. His breakthrough as a playwright came with La Course de Flambeau (1901). As a result, he became the preferred author of the conservative Comédie-Française .

Before the First World War, Hervieu was one of the most respected and influential French writers, president of the Sociétés des autuers dramatiques and the Société des gens lettres , Grand officier de la Légion d'honneur . He represented France in 1908 at the writers' congress in Berlin. Although he was committed to Alfred Dreyfus , he was also very well networked with the moderate right and friends with Raymond Poincaré , among others . In 1900 he was elected a member of the Académie française , where he was soon considered a "gray eminence". However, his fame faded soon after his death.

plant

Hervieu settled all of his novels in the upper class aristocratic milieu. In his naturalistic descriptions and detailed psychological analyzes, he exercised sharp social criticism . He portrays a society that knows about its approaching doom and has given up all traditional values ​​in order to enrich itself and indulge in amusement without restraint.

Hervieu chose similar themes for his dramas. At the same time he tried to find a theoretical foundation for his dramaturgy . Following the conception of Alexandre Dumas ' “Pièce à thèse” and the naturalism of Henry Becque , Hervieu formulated a “Théâtre d'idees”. In doing so, he usually played through a thesis in the plot of the piece in order to shed light on social problems and phenomena of his time. “Nowadays we try to show,” explained Hervieu, “how the struggle for existence mercilessly oppresses those who are reckless, too weak to defend themselves and whose passions are stronger than their will to resist.” In his In later dramas, Hervieu tried to use these principles to create a contemporary form of tragedy by continuing to write about the upper-class milieu, but devoting himself to depicting so-called 'eternal' conflicts.

reception

In the contemporary reception, the solidity of Hervieu's drama concept was initially praised, but social criticism was mostly ignored. With Hervieu's later turn to timeless conflicts, the relevance of his drama to the present took a back seat.

In Germany Hervieu was far less successful than in his home country. Hermann Bahr judged the play Men's Rights ( La Loi de l'homme ), which was performed at the Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna in 1898 : “It tells us nothing, it has no life, instead of people we see characters who are the author on his strings pulls. He does this with great skill, but we no longer want it; We no longer like to see the author's hands in the game: 'that's too much theater for us'. "

Arthur Eloesser was also unable to win over the writer Hervieu: “He is the Anglicized French, a type that Balzac foresaw in one of his novels. ... Without temperament, without naivety, without any interesting youthfulness, [Hervieu] knew how to give his temperament, his intelligence, his calm, cosmopolitan correctness a literary stamp. ... His theater is unimaginative, umplastic, lean, it has been called théâtre-squelette, but it is at least interesting as a planned construction, as an energetic logical operation, which, however, counts more on terms than on people. So his nature leads him to the thesis. "

Works

Autograph Paul Hervieus

prose

  • Diogène le Chien , (1882) digitized .
  • La Bêtise parisienne: Choses de l'amour, Insinuations psychologiques, Curieux usages, Croquis, du Costume féminin. (1882) Digitized .
  • Les Yeux verts et les yeux bleus , (1886) digitized .
  • L'Alpe homicide , (1886).
  • L'Inconnu (1887) digitized
  • Deux Plaisanteries: Histoire d'un duel, Aux Affaires étrangères (1888).
  • Flirt (1890) digitized .
  • L'Exorcisée (1891).
  • Peints par eux-mêmes , (1893) digitized .
  • Œuvres: Diogène le Chien, l'Esquimau, Argile de femme, Une scène de collège, Krab, la Matrone adultère, Assentat à la pudeur, Guignol, Prologue de l'Incendie de Sodome, Peints par eux-mêmes (2 vols., 1894-1898).
  • L'Armature , (1895) digitized
  • Le Petit Duc. Figures falotes et figures sombres (1896) digitized .
  • Le Bienheureux du Val de Pralognan (1921).

Pieces

literature

  • Alfred Binet : La création littéraire. Portrait psychologique de M. Paul Hervieu . In: L'année psychologique Vol. 10 (1903), pp. 1-62.
  • Edmond Estève: Paul Hervieu, conteur, moraliste et dramaturge. Essai de critique littéraire. Paris 1917.
  • Helene Burkhardt: Studies on Paul Hervieu as a novelist and as a playwright. Zurich 1917.
  • Luise Wegener: The portrayal of women in the dramas by Paul Hervieu. Diss. Phil. Munster 1937; Bochum-Langendreer 1938.
  • Sabri Fahmy: Paul Hervieu, Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre , Diss. Phil. Aix-Marseille, 1942.
  • Wolfgang Asholt: Socio-critical theater in France. (1887-1914). Zugl .: Münster (Westphalia), Univ., Habil.-Schr., 1983. Winter, Heidelberg 1984, ISBN 3533035484 .
  • Justus Fetscher: madness of love, courage to sacrifice. The revolutionary dramas Paul Hervieus and Romain Rollands and the public of the Third Republic . In: Gudrun Gersmann u. Hubertus coal (ed.): France 1871–1914. The Third Republic and the French Revolution . Stuttgart 2002, pp. 37-53.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Adolphe Brisson: Le Theater et les Moeurs. Paris undated [1907], p. 180.
  2. ^ Wolfgang Asholt: Socio-critical theater in France. (1887-1914). Zugl .: Münster (Westphalia), Univ., Habil.-Schr., 1983. Winter, Heidelberg 1984, ISBN 3533035484 , pp. 202-221
  3. ↑ Hermann Bahr: Men's Rights. (By Paul Hervieu. German by Ferdinand Groß. First performed in the Deutsches Volkstheater on March 5, 1898). In: Vienna Theater. (1892-1898). Berlin: S. Fischer 1899, 417-421. Before that already as "Das Theater" in: Die Zeit, 14 (1898) # 180, 170. (March 12, 1898)
  4. ^ Artur Eloesser: Literary portraits from modern France by Arthur Eloesser. , Berlin S. Fischer 1904, p. 35.
personal data
SURNAME Hervieu, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Liris (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuilly-sur-Seine
DATE OF DEATH October 25, 1915
Place of death Paris