Goncourt, Edmond (1822-96) and Jules Goncourt (1830-70). Novelists, historians, men of letters, and authors of the famous Journal, which provides a fascinating, frank, personal (and often biased) view of their age and an invaluable source of anecdotes and portraits of contemporary figures for the period 1851-1896. Edmond was born in Nancy, Jules in Paris. Supreme aesthetes, highly neurotic, utterly misogynist, with refined tastes and a mania for collecting objets d'art, the Goncourt brothers devoted their whole lives to art and literature. They developed together a distinctive, impressionistic style, called écriture artiste, achieving a remarkable symbiosis in their collaboration, writing as one until the death of Jules. The survivor, Edmond, always sought to keep alive his brother's spirit. They frequented the salon of Princess Mathilde during the Second Empire and featured in the famous ‘dîners Magny’, the fortnightly gatherings that brought together leading men of letters and science (and George Sand) at a Paris restaurant in the 1860s. After 1885 Edmond presided over a literary salon, the Sunday meetings at the ‘Grenier’, and in his will left money to found the Académie Goncourt which began to meet in 1903, when the Prix Goncourt was also founded [see Prizes, Literary].
Their career as novelists began inauspiciously with En 18˙˙ (1851), which ran foul of the imperial censors. Their first novel of note was Les Hommes de lettres (1860), later called Charles Demailly (1868), the story of a young writer and journalist driven mad by his shrewish wife and his enemies in the press. Sœur Philomène (1861) is a simple love story, a ‘clinical analysis’ set in a hospital, whilst Renée Mauperin (1864), a novel of bourgeois manners, has a more complex plot and seeks to represent the ‘modern young woman’. The brothers published three more novels before the death of Jules: Germinie Lacerteux (1864), their most significant work; Manette Salomon (1867), which returns to the theme of the artist destroyed by woman; and Madame Gervaisais (1869), which is set in Rome and deals with the religious hysteria of the main character, who dies in the presence of the pope. Seeing a direct equivalence between writing history and novels (‘L'histoire est un roman qui a été, le roman est l'histoire qui aurait pu être’, Journal, 24 November 1861), with their passion for anecdotal detail, tableaux, and revealing documents, they wrote a series of monographs on 18th-c. history and art, notably on famous women such as Marie-Antoinette and the mistresses of Louis XV. Their play Henriette Maréchal had a hostile reception at the Comédie-Française in 1865, but fared better when revived in 1885.
After 1870, along with his studies of Japanese art, Edmond published La Fille Élisa (1877), a novel on prostitution and prison life; Les Frères Zemganno (1879), about two brothers who are circus performers; La Faustin (1882), the story of an actress; and Chérie (1884), another ‘psychological and physiological study’ of a young woman.
[David Baguley]
Bibliography
- R. Ricatte, La Création romanesque chez les Goncourt (1850-1870) (1953)
- R. Baldick, The Goncourts (1960)
