Paul Bourget (1852–1935)

Bourget was an important French writer around the turn of the 19th century but he has evidently fallen into obscurity; I certainly hadn't heard of him until coming across a reference to him in Nabokov. A little research followed: in a 1914 issue of the Edinburgh Review, Georges Chatterton-Hill makes a strongly felt case for a change in contemporary French literature, which he saw as abandoning the pessimism, nihilism, and degeneracy of the works of Balzac, Zola, et al., turning to a renewed optimism, healthy vigor, and patriotism marked by the works of Bourget, Barres, Bordeaux, Lasserre and Claudel.

Balzac and Zola had nothing to worry about long term, but Chatterton-Hill didn't know that. He had the bad timing to publish his article a few months before World War 1 began, which reminded everyone of the timeless benefits of pessimism and nihilism. Balzac and Zola were probably better writers than Chatterton-Hill's optimistic French grouping of course, but nevermind, it was interesting to take a look at a past century's literary dead end.

Chatterton-Hill dated the initial birth of this "turning" of French literature to Bourget's publication of Le Disciple in 1889, which would come to fruition a couple decades later. The Disciple is a philosophical novel that takes aim at positivism and scientific determinism. Sounds fun, no? It was actually a bestseller in France at the time. The set up is that we have an older philosopher, Adrien Sixte, who is well known for his writings arguing that mankind is a mere thinking machine, whose behaviors are absolutely determined by scientific laws, living in an amoral and godless world where society labels some behaviors virtues and others vices with no real merit to such labeling. With enough experimentation and information, the scientific laws determining how people behave could be discovered, with the same predictability and repeatability that one finds in a chemistry lab.

His writings influence a young scholar, Robert Greslou, who visits Sixte. Later Greslou is arrested for the murder of a young woman in a family he works for as a tutor, and he writes a lengthy "confession" to Sixte in which his application of Sixte's ideas to an experiment on human feelings and behavior are revealed to have terrible effects. This confession is a good deal more of telling than showing, thus it is hardly great literature, but it's not bad either, and it does have its philosophical interest. It also has aspects of an unfolding mystery, though Bourget would surely have found that sort of interest as a poor thing to take away from his novel.… (more)