Octave Mirbeau (1848 - 1917) was a French novelist, playwright, journalist and art critic associated with anarchist politics and with the Dreyfusard cause. [1] He wrote the novels Le Jardin des supplices and Le Journal d'une femme de chambre and the successful comedy Les affaires sont les affaires, and as a critic he was among the earliest and most forceful supporters of Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin. [2]
Early life
Mirbeau was born on 16 February 1848 in Trévières, in Normandy, and grew up in the small town of Rémalard. He was educated at the Jesuit Lycée Saint-François-Xavier in Vannes, an experience he later described with lasting bitterness, and afterwards studied at the Paris Law Faculty without completing a legal career. [1] He served during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the experience shaped a durable hostility to militarism.
Journalism and ghostwriting
Mirbeau entered Parisian journalism in the 1870s, initially as a secretary and political hack for Bonapartist patrons, and for some years wrote anonymously or under other names, including novels published under pseudonyms. [3] He later repudiated this period and moved decisively to the left, becoming a prominent polemicist in papers such as Le Figaro, Gil Blas and Le Journal, and associating himself with anarchist and libertarian ideas.
As an art critic he defended the Impressionists when they were still contested, wrote at length on Monet, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, promoted Rodin, and published one of the first substantial appreciations of Vincent van Gogh. His articles carried real commercial weight in the Paris art market of the period. [2] During the Dreyfus affair he campaigned publicly for the condemned officer's rehabilitation and helped support Émile Zola's defence.
Novels and plays
Under his own name Mirbeau published Le Calvaire in 1886 and L'Abbé Jules in 1888, both drawing on his own experience and both attacking institutions of church, army and family. Sébastien Roch, in 1890, treated the abuse of a boy at a religious boarding school. [1]
Le Jardin des supplices, published in 1899, joins political satire to an allegory of cruelty set in a Chinese penal garden, and remains his most notorious work. Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, of 1900, narrates bourgeois households from the viewpoint of a servant and was later filmed by Jean Renoir and by Luis Buñuel. [4]
His play Les affaires sont les affaires, staged at the Comédie-Française in 1903, was an international success and gave the stage the figure of Isidore Lechat, the modern speculator. [3]
Later years and legacy
Mirbeau continued to write fiction, drama and criticism into the new century, including the automobile narrative La 628-E8. His health declined during the First World War and he died in Paris on 16 February 1917, his sixty-ninth birthday. [1]
Long treated as a marginal figure, he has been the subject of sustained scholarly re-evaluation since the late twentieth century, with his complete works republished and a dedicated research society devoted to him. His novels are read as precursors of modernist and surrealist writing, and his criticism is a primary source for the reception of Impressionism and of Van Gogh. [2]
