Biography in Contemporary France

Abstract

In the preface to Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey declares “we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition” (vi). To the French this assertion appears remarkably erroneous. For it is first in Great Britain, with Izaak Walton and John Aubrey, then in the eighteenth century, with Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell, that biography received its lettres de noblesse. French literature has hardly any canonical biographies or biographers comparable with these. Perhaps Protestantism played a historical role in this respect, with the relatively greater importance it gives to the individual, and a tendency to scrutinize each individual life, looking for signs of grace. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle, developing a vision of history centered on the cult of Great Men in On Heroes and Hero Worship, could declare that “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men” (39), and in America his disciple Ralph Waldo Emerson, the thinker of Transcendentalism that he himself described as an Americanization of German Idealism, and the author of Representative Men, insisted that “There is properly no history, only biography” ( 15). In France, this was the tradition of Gustave Lanson, Ferdinand Brunetière, Hippolyte Taine, and most of all Charles-Augustin Sainte- Beuve,¹ who based literary science on the study of the biography of writers.