Prosper Mérimée

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The French author Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) was a prose writer of the romantic period in France, important for his short stories, which mark the transition from romanticism toward the more objective works of the second half of the century.

Prosper Mérimée, a Parisian born and bred, grew up with the other French romantics. Although he shared some of their traits - a love of the exotic and the violent, for instance - his skeptical, pessimistic temperament kept him from their emotional excesses. He hid his emotional sensitivity beneath a cover of ironic objectivity. As restraint and ironic objectivity were among the principal goals of the later French realists, he stands as their precursor.

Mérimée's initial writings were entertaining frauds, published as alleged translations. A more important work under his own name, Chronique du règne de Charles IX, brought him to serious public attention in 1829. The Chronique is a historical novel, but it differs from the contemporary romantic ones in its impartial stance in recounting the Protestant and Catholic positions during the Wars of Religion in 16th-century France. True to form, Mérimée refused to provide an ending and mockingly invited his readers to invent one for themselves. Like his friend Stendhal, he feared being mocked himself and never allowed himself to appear to take any of his writings seriously, posing usually as an amateur who happened for the moment to be writing a story.

A very learned man, Mérimée was appointed inspector general of historical monuments in 1831. He performed major services by saving many ancient monuments from destruction, among others the church of St-Savin with its important 12th-century frescoes. He traveled widely through France, southern Europe, and the Near East, finding there the settings for many of his short stories (nouvelles).

Mateo Falcone (1829) and the longer Colomba (1841) and Carmen (1845) are the principal works for which Mérimée is now remembered, typical in their settings in Spain or Corsica, their portrayal of primitive passions, and their clear, concise style. Each story is a new experiment in form. The author's position remains distant, and Mérimée usually prefers the concrete to the abstract, giving a character life by a gesture or pose alone. Carmen is the source for Georges Bizet's opera (1875).

Mérimée ended his career as a writer in 1848, but he was a familiar figure at the court of the Second Empire, in part owing to his long prior acquaintance with the empress Eugénie. He was also among the first in France to appreciate Russian literature, translating Aleksandr Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, and Nikolai Gogol.

Further Reading

A thorough account of Mérimée's life is Alan William Raitt, xProsper Mérimée (1970). Sylvia Lyons, The Life and Times of Prosper Mérimée (1948), is good for placing Mérimée within his period. An excellent short section on his life, character, and works is in Albert J. George, Short Fiction in France, 1800-50 (1964). See also G. H. Johnstone Derwent, Prosper Mérimée: A Mask and a Face (1926).

Mérimée, Prosper (1803-70). French author of short stories, novels, plays, and historical and archaeological studies, Mérimée was born of a good bourgeois family (his father taught fine arts), first studied the law, but soon opted for a literary career. Marked by Romantic themes and concerns, but often treating them playfully or with ironic distance, Mérimée began his literary career with two hoaxes. Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul (1825, 1830) presents six mostly short plays set in Spain or South America and somewhat inspired by the liberties of Spanish Golden Age theatre. La Guzla (1827) is a collection of mostly spurious Illyrian folk-songs, etc. La Jacquerie (1828) is a historical drama, but full of violence and revolt, as is La Famille de Carvajal (1828), a dramatic reworking of the Cenci tale which initiates Mérimée's long-standing concern with the relations between eroticism and death. His historical novel, Chronique du règne de Charles IX (1829), is one of French Romanticism's better efforts at the genre; he was a more meticulous historian than either Dumas or Vigny, but hardly hides his anticlericalism in this recounting of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

The rest of his literary output is essentially short stories or novellas, always tersely written, usually exemplifying a ghastly tragic situation but with a distance created by framing devices, by the use of understatement and ambiguity, and by various forms of irony. The collection Mosaïque (1833) included Mateo Falcone, a Corsican tale of a youth who betrays his family honour for a silver watch and is killed by his father; Tamango, about a revolt on a slave ship and the tragic death or bitterly farcical end of all involved; and Le Vase étrusque, where unjustified suspicions of infidelity lead to the lover's death by duel, and the heroine's by heartbreak. In 1841 appeared perhaps his two best tales, Colomba and La Vénus d'Ille, the latter a fantastic tale in which it is made to appear that a statue of Venus has killed the less-than-sympathetic hero and driven his fiancée to madness; here Mérimée's sceptical narrator is in many ways a self-portrait. Carmen (1852) was accompanied by Arsène Guillot, a tale of triangular love where the working-class heroine is sacrificed, but with tragic effect, to the devout but adulterous lady of high society. Later in life Mérimée published fewer tales, but they remained remarkable, in particular Djoûmane (1873), which blends the oneiric, the exotic, and the sexual; Lokis (1869), again an archaeological tale set in Lithuania and dealing with miscegenation between bear and woman and the resultant vampire activities of their offspring; and La Chambre bleue (1871), a rather Maupassant-style tale where an adulterous tryst is marked by blood and death, comfortingly revealed to be only wine and drunkenness.

Literature was a secondary activity for Mérimée, who earned his living as inspector of historical monuments and did much for the preservation of Vézelay, Avignon, etc.; despite his friendship with Viollet-le-Duc, he generally favoured preservation over restoration. His tireless efforts to preserve the vestiges of France's historical and architectural past produced a number of highly readable volumes of travel literature. He also wrote several historical studies, some still of solid value, on Russian and Spanish history; the best is probably his Histoire de Don Pèdre I^er, roi de Castille (1848). He had known Eugénie de Montijo, Napoleon III's empress, since her childhood and was always devoted to her and hence loyal to the regime of her husband; he lived to see the defeat of France and the fall of the Second Empire in 1870. He was a close friend of Stendhal, and also of Turgenev. Very familiar with English and Russian literature (he learned Russian as an adult), he did much to introduce Turgenev, Gogol, and others to French literature. His correspondence has been ably edited and provides rich, comprehending, and yet caustic judgements on the literature, politics, and personalities of his age. He combined to a rare degree radical doubts about all belief-systems—religious or political—with a love for individual, heroic, even criminal behaviour, and a sense of how aesthetic distance could maintain both awareness and perspective.

[Frank Paul Bowman]

Bibliography

• A. Raitt, Prosper Mérimée (1970)
• J. Autin, Prosper Mérimée, archéologue, homme politique (1983)