Paul Bourget

Paul Bourget: The Novel as a Charge Sheet

Twenty-two thousand copies in six weeks. That was the verdict of the French reading public on *Le Disciple* in 1889 — a novel in which a philosopher's disciple seduces a young woman as a laboratory experiment, drives her to suicide, and is shot dead by her brother. Paul Bourget had written it as an indictment: of positivism, of determinism, and of the professors who taught the young that human beings are machines and then declined to take responsibility for what the young did with the lesson. Anatole France defended free thought; Ferdinand Brunetière defended tradition; the argument ran for years. Few novelists have ever picked a fight this precisely.

A Mathematician's Son

Paul Charles Joseph Bourget was born in Amiens on 2 September 1852. His father was a professor of mathematics who later took a post at a college in Clermont-Ferrand, where the boy had his first schooling. He went on to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École des Hautes Études — a rigorous, secular, scientific education of exactly the kind he would spend his maturity arraigning. He abandoned Catholicism in 1867, aged fifteen.

His first ambition was verse. *Au bord de la mer* appeared in the early 1870s, and a sequence of collections followed, ending with *Les Aveux* in 1882. The poems have outlasted their reputation by an unexpected route: Claude Debussy set several of them, including "Beau soir," "Romance" and "Les Cloches," and they are sung in recital halls today by audiences who have never opened one of his novels.

The Diagnostician

What made Bourget's name was not poetry but criticism of an unusual sort. The *Essais de psychologie contemporaine*, collected in 1883 from pieces first published in the *Nouvelle Revue*, treated the leading writers of the age not as artists to be praised or faulted but as symptoms to be read. Bourget examined them the way a physician examines a patient, looking for the disease of the century in the texture of their sentences. It was a method — literature as a clinical record of a civilisation's condition — and it established him as one of the most influential French critics of his generation before he had published a serious novel.

The Psychological Novel

Then he applied the method to fiction of his own. *L'Irréparable* (1884), *Cruelle énigme* (1885), *André Cornelis* (1886) and *Mensonges* (1887) built his reputation as the anatomist of interior life, particularly of women's emotional predicaments and the drift of young Frenchmen without conviction. Where Zola gave you the crowd, the mine, the marketplace, Bourget gave you a drawing room and the twenty minutes in which a marriage silently ends. The naturalist novel described conditions; the Bourget novel described consciousness.

Le Disciple

*Le Disciple* was the culmination. Robert Greslou, a young tutor steeped in the deterministic psychology of the philosopher Adrien Sixte — a figure unmistakably modelled on Hippolyte Taine — takes a position in the household of the de Jussats. He decides to treat Charlotte de Jussat not as a woman but as an experiment, systematically producing emotions in her and recording the results. When she grasps how cold the operation has been, she poisons herself with a drug he supplied. Greslou is imprisoned for her murder and writes his confession to Sixte, who has spent the novel serenely certain that ideas carry no moral freight. Reading it, the philosopher understands that his teaching walked into that house. Charlotte's brother, a royalist cavalry officer, kills Greslou.

The thesis is unambiguous. Science, Bourget argues, cannot supply an ethics; a psychology that abolishes responsibility abolishes the ground on which any human life can be conducted; and the intellectual who forms the minds of the young is answerable for the men they become. The preface addressed itself directly to Frenchmen between eighteen and twenty-five, telling them that their moral development was France's own and urging them to help restore a diminished country. Critics called it a literary event and a first-rate book; Gladstone praised it; John Cowper Powys later put it among his hundred best books.

The Convert

The novel marked a turn in its author as well as in French letters. Bourget began moving back toward the Catholicism he had dropped at fifteen, and by 1901 the return was complete. Agnosticism, he had decided, was corrosive; in an American interview in 1893 he argued that the teaching of the Church shielded people from the moral disasters that follow unchecked passion and sensuality. He was elected to the Académie française in 1894 and promoted officer of the Légion d'honneur in 1895, a decade after first receiving it.

The late fiction is frankly doctrinal. *Cosmopolis* (1892), *L'Étape* (1902) and above all *Un Divorce* (1904) — a sustained defence of the Church's prohibition of divorce as a matter of natural law — are novels written to prove propositions. He kept travelling and observing: *Sensations d'Italie* (1891), *Études et portraits* (1888) out of England and Ireland, and the two volumes of *Outre-Mer* (1895) recording his 1893 journey through the United States. He was in the offices of *Le Figaro* on 16 March 1914 when Henriette Caillaux shot the editor Gaston Calmette dead, one of the great scandals of the era.

Why Paul Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on diagnostic intelligence rather than on lyric or narrative gift. Bourget's real invention was a way of reading: the *Essais de psychologie contemporaine* treated writers as symptoms of a collective illness, and in doing so gave France a vocabulary for talking about its own decadence. He then transposed that method into fiction and helped shift the French novel decisively from the naturalists' external world to the interior one — the roman psychologique is substantially his. And in *Le Disciple* he did something few novelists manage: he framed a live philosophical question, the moral accountability of the teacher, so sharply that the country's best minds had to answer him. The France–Brunetière debate happened because the book made it unavoidable, and 22,000 copies in six weeks is not a fluke of publicity. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The counter-case is severe and it is essentially aesthetic. Bourget wrote thesis novels, and a thesis novel is a rigged trial: Greslou is depraved before the philosophy reaches him, and Sixte's change of heart at the end is the author's demand rather than the character's development. The later books are worse in this respect than the earlier ones, and *Un Divorce* is closer to a tract than a novel. His readership evaporated within a generation of his death; he is now a name in literary history rather than a writer people read. The fairest statement is that Bourget was a genius of critical method and of intellectual provocation whose fiction was the vehicle rather than the achievement — a man whose ideas about novels have proved more durable than his novels.

Legacy

Bourget died in Paris on Christmas Day 1935, aged eighty-three, and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. His conservative Catholic politics went out of fashion faster than his prose did, and the two sank together. What survives is the shape of the argument he forced: whether the intellectual owes anything to the people who believe him. Debussy's settings survive too, which would probably have annoyed him — a man who spent fifty years arguing about the fate of France, remembered on the strength of some early verses about a beautiful evening.

Achievements

• Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1931
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour — 1935
• Commander of the Legion of Honour — 1923
• Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1895
• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1885
• Notable work: Cruelle énigme
• Notable work: Au bord de la mer
• Notable work: André Cornélis
• Educated at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Collège Sainte-Barbe and École pratique des hautes études
• Worked as playwright, writer and essayist