Tristan Bernard: France's Most Quoted Man
For roughly thirty years, if a good joke was circulating in France and nobody knew who had made it, the French assumed Tristan Bernard had. He was credited with a great many quips that were not his, which is the highest form of stylistic recognition available to a humorist: his manner was so distinct that anonymous wit defaulted to his name. He wrote boulevard comedies for Parisian audiences on Sunday afternoons, ran bicycle velodromes, invented crossword puzzles, called himself an anarchist, and was arrested by the Nazis at seventy-seven.
Besançon to the Bar
He was born in Besançon on 7 September 1866. He studied law, performed his military service, and then did what almost no future comic dramatist does: he went into heavy industry, taking on the management of an aluminium smelter. The training was in the end useful. Bernard's comedies are full of people conducting business, negotiating, calculating small advantages — the material of a man who had actually run something.
The Velodrome Years
In the 1890s he moved from metals to sport, managing the Vélodrome de la Seine at Levallois-Perret and then the Vélodrome Buffalo. This was the golden age of French track cycling, when the velodromes drew the whole social range of Paris; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was among the regulars at Bernard's tracks. He is credited with introducing the bell that signals the final lap of a race — a small piece of theatrical engineering, and a hint about how his mind worked. He understood that a crowd needs to be told when to start paying attention.
He began writing about sport before he wrote for the stage, which places him among the first generation of French journalists to treat athletics as a serious subject rather than a novelty.
Boulevard
The theatre he chose was the *théâtre de boulevard*: commercial comedy written to entertain the Parisian middle classes, performed to full houses, and reviewed with the condescension reserved for things people actually enjoy. Bernard was among the best practitioners the form ever had. He began with *Les pieds nickelés* in 1895 and hit his stride with *L'Anglais tel qu'on le parle* in 1899 — English As It Is Spoken — a one-act farce built entirely on linguistic misunderstanding that remains the most performed thing he wrote. *Triplepatte* followed in 1905, written with André Godfernaux and later adapted into English as *Toddles*; then *Monsieur Codomat* in 1907, *Les Jumeaux de Brighton* in 1908, and *Le Petit Café* in 1911.
Britannica characterises the work precisely: "a tone of light cynicism and a cross fire of lively dialogue," combined with a keen insight into the foibles of the bourgeois audiences he was writing for. That is the paradox at the centre of his career. He was flattering and puncturing the same people in the same evening, and they paid to be punctured.
He wrote novels alongside the plays — *Mémoires d'un jeune homme rangé* in 1899, *Mathilde et ses mitaines* in 1912, *La Féerie bourgeoise* in 1924 — in the same register of humorous, sharply observed social comedy. In 1936, with the political weather in Europe turning, he published *Le Juif de Venise*, a reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Shylock. It is the one place in his output where the joke stops.
1943
In September 1943, in the south of France, Tristan Bernard was arrested because he was a Jew and interned at Drancy — the transit camp from which French Jews were sent to Auschwitz. He was seventy-seven. He was released within weeks after the intervention of two friends from the theatre, Sacha Guitry and the actress Arletty, and survived the war. His son Jean-Jacques Bernard, himself a playwright and a convert to Catholicism, was imprisoned at Compiègne during the occupation and also survived. One reference-work assessment of his humour — that he "combined the wit of the French with the bitter humor of the Jew" — reads differently once those dates are in view.
Why Tristan Is Called a Genius
The gift was compression: the ability to construct a sentence so exactly weighted that it survives detachment from its speaker, its context and its author. That is a real and uncommon technical skill, closer to versification than to storytelling, and it explains the strangest fact of his reputation — that for three decades a large share of the jokes circulating in France were attributed to him whether or not he had made them. A person can only be misattributed at that scale if his style is recognisable enough to function as a signature. The same faculty operated at greater length in *L'Anglais tel qu'on le parle*, a play built out of a single misunderstanding sustained for an entire act without the mechanism showing.
The honest counter-case is that this is craft, not intellect, and Bernard neither claimed nor pretended otherwise. Britannica's verdict is a compliment with a blade in it: his "merit consisted in limiting his literary ambitions to his capabilities." He wrote for a commercial theatre designed to fill Sunday afternoons, he wrote a great deal of it, and almost none of it is staged today outside of *L'Anglais tel qu'on le parle*. He advanced no form, founded no movement, and belongs in none of the accounts of how French literature changed between 1890 and 1940, though he knew and amused most of the people who did change it. He is a genius of the sentence, which is a smaller thing than a genius of the novel or the play — but it is a genuine category, and very few people have ever occupied it as securely.
Legacy
He died on 7 December 1947, three months after his eighty-first birthday, having outlived by four years the state that tried to deport him. The velodrome bell he is said to have introduced still rings for the last lap of track races around the world, which is a peculiar and rather perfect monument for a man whose whole art was knowing exactly when to signal the finish. His plays occupy a modest permanent corner of the French repertoire. His jokes, many of which were never his, are still in circulation.
Achievements
- Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1939
- Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1913
- Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1903
