Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau: The Man Who Taught France to Look

On 31 March 1891, in *L'Écho de Paris*, a well-paid journalist published a long appreciation of a Dutch painter who had shot himself eight months earlier and whom almost nobody in France had heard of. Vincent van Gogh, Octave Mirbeau wrote, understood "the soul of flowers" and had seen "the sad, unknown and divine in the eyes of poor madmen and sick people, who were his brothers." It is among the first serious critical claims ever made for Van Gogh. Mirbeau made claims like it for a living, and he was right about almost all of them.

A Norman Doctor's Son

He was born on 16 February 1848 in Trévières, in Normandy, to Ladislas-François Mirbeau, a physician, and Eugènie-Augustine Duboscq. He was sent to the Collège Saint-François-Xavier, a Jesuit institution, and what happened to him there marked him permanently; his novel *Sébastien Roch* (1890) fictionalises the experience as sexual abuse and institutional cover-up, and it remains one of the earliest French novels to treat the subject at all. He took a baccalaureate at the University of Caen in 1866, and in 1870 served in the Franco-Prussian War with the Forty-ninth Regiment, an experience that left him with a settled hatred of every institution that constrains a person's liberty — the army, the Church, the school, the family, the market.

The Ghost Years

Mirbeau's beginnings are the least admirable part of his story, and he never disguised them. Between 1872 and 1884 he worked as a secretary and editor for a succession of papers — *L'Ordre de Paris*, *Le Gaulois*, *Paris-Journal* — writing to order for Bonapartist and Royalist proprietors, producing work he did not believe under names that were not his. Some of his early journalism carried the anti-Semitism standard on the French right of the period. He spent the 1890s repudiating all of it, and when the Dreyfus Affair broke he became one of the most conspicuous defenders of the condemned officer, at real professional cost. It is a rare thing to watch a man publicly dismantle his own earlier convictions and rebuild.

The Novels That Broke the Form

He signed his first novel, *Le Calvaire*, in 1886, the same year as *Lettres de ma chaumière*. *L'Abbé Jules* followed in 1888 and has been called the first pre-Freudian novel in French, written under the pressure of Dostoyevsky — a portrait of a priest whose interior life is a war of drives rather than a moral progress. Then *Sébastien Roch* in 1890.

The two books that made him notorious came at the turn of the century. *Le Jardin des supplices* (1899) welds a satire of French political corruption to an extended tour of a Chinese prison garden where torture is performed as horticulture and aesthetics — a structure so violently discontinuous that readers have argued for a century about whether it is one book or two glued together. *Le Journal d'une femme de chambre* (1900) hands the narration to a domestic servant and lets her describe the bourgeois households she has worked in from below stairs — a vantage point French fiction had not seriously granted before. Both novels proceed by collage and refuse the verisimilitude that Naturalism had made compulsory. Mirbeau was not writing badly-made realist novels. He was declining to write realist novels.

The Most Consequential Critic in France

His art criticism may be the more durable achievement. He wrote for Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh and, above all, Rodin — nineteen articles on the sculptor between 1885 and 1914. He wrote for a general readership rather than a coterie, holding that "in painting, it is through the eyes that thought must be excited," and he judged by emotional force rather than by academic correctness.

The effect was measurable in money. His articles on Gauguin ahead of the painter's 1891 auction helped it raise some ten thousand francs — the sum that paid for the voyage to Tahiti, and therefore for most of what we now think of as Gauguin. Artists repaid him in kind: Monet gave him two canvases, Rodin eleven works in plaster and bronze, Gauguin a drawing around 1891. The collection was sold after his death, some of it staying with his widow until 1938.

Anarchist, Dreyfusard, Playwright

He married the actress Alice Regnault in 1887. He called himself an anarchist and meant it in a specific sense: he wrote against poverty, colonialism, capital punishment, the treatment of children and the hypocrisy of every established body, in the name of individual liberty and intellectual honesty. In 1903 he became one of the ten founding members of the Académie Goncourt — an anti-institutionalist helping to build an institution, a contradiction he seems to have enjoyed.

The theatre gave him his largest success. *Les affaires sont les affaires* (1903) was acclaimed worldwide and remains his greatest theatrical success, the one Mirbeau work that entered the international repertoire in his lifetime. *Farces et moralités* (1904) went the other way, dismantling stage language in ways that anticipate the experimental theatre of decades later, and *Le Foyer* followed in 1908. He died in Paris on 16 February 1917 — his sixty-ninth birthday.

Why Octave Is Called a Genius

Mirbeau's distinguishing faculty was judgement in the presence of the new: the capacity to look at something nobody had yet agreed was good and to be right about it, repeatedly, over thirty years and across two art forms. This is harder and rarer than it sounds. Critics who back the avant-garde produce hits and misses in roughly equal measure; Mirbeau's list — Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet, Rodin, Pissarro — is almost perfectly ratified by posterity. He was writing seriously about Van Gogh within a year of the man's death, when the paintings had no market and no reputation to borrow from. That is not taste following consensus; it is taste creating it.

The same faculty operated on his own writing. *L'Abbé Jules* anticipated psychoanalytic interiority; *Le Jardin des supplices* and *Le Journal d'une femme de chambre* abandoned Naturalist convention while Naturalism was still the ruling orthodoxy; *Farces et moralités* pulled theatrical language apart before anyone had a name for doing so. Modern scholarship has spent decades arguing that his role in Belle Époque culture was pivotal rather than peripheral, and that the reputation which reduced him to a handful of scandalous titles badly understated him.

The counter-case is real. Mirbeau spent twelve years writing opinions he did not hold for money, and his early journalism carried prejudices he later renounced — an honourable reversal, but the earlier work exists. His novels are structurally chaotic in ways that are sometimes visionary and sometimes simply uncontrolled; *Le Jardin des supplices* has as many detractors as champions. His fame long rested on three books out of an enormous output, which suggests the output was uneven. And a great deal of his influence was exercised through other people's work: he was the man who saw first, not always the man who made.

Legacy

Mirbeau's fingerprints are on the modern canon in a way few critics achieve — Gauguin's Tahiti and Van Gogh's reputation both owe him something concrete. *Le Journal d'une femme de chambre* has outlived nearly all its contemporaries, and *Les affaires sont les affaires* still plays. After a century of being filed as a minor scandalist, he is now read as one of the sharpest and least comfortable intelligences of his age.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Diary of a Chambermaid