Barbey D'Aurevilly, Jules (1808-89). An important precursor of the late 19th-c. French Catholic Revival, converted in 1846-7, Barbey carried forward into the post- Commune generation the dark Romantic inheritance of Baudelaire and his anti-democratic dandy pose. Huysmans, Péladan, and Bloy were all influenced by his extreme right-wing journalism and criticism (published in, for example, Le Pays, L'Éclair, Le Constitutionnel) and especially by his prose fiction. His major novels, exercises in sadistic melodrama tricked out, post-conversion, with the thrills of blasphemous transgression, include L'Amour impossible (1841), Une vieille maîtresse (1851), L'Ensorcelée (1854), and Un prêtre marié (1865). The short-story collection Les Diaboliques, prosecuted by the police on first publication in 1874, enjoyed a succès de scandale when reissued with nine plates by the engraver Félicien Rops in 1886.
[Jennifer Birkett]
