Octave Mirbeau

in full Octave-Henri-Marie Mirbeau

born Feb. 16, 1850, Trévières, France
died Feb. 16, 1917, Paris

French journalist and writer of novels and plays who unsparingly satirized the clergy and social conditions of his time and was one of the 10 original members of the Académie Goncourt, founded in 1903.

His first work was as a journalist for Bonapartist and Royalist newspapers. He made his reputation as a storyteller with tales of the Norman peasantry, Lettres de ma chaumière (1886; “Letters from My Cottage”) and Le Calvaire (1887; “The Calvary”), a chapter of which, on the French defeat of 1870, aroused much rancour. In 1888 he wrote the story of a mad priest, L’Abbé Jules (“The Priest Jules”), and, in 1890, Sébastien Roch, a merciless picture of the Jesuit school he had attended. All his novels, from Le Jardin des supplices (1899; “The Garden of Torture”) and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900; “Journal of a Lady’s Maid”) to La 628-E8 (1907) and Dingo (1913), were bitter social satires.

His dramatic work was of high quality, and Les Mauvais Bergers (1897; “The Bad Shepherds”) was compared to the work of Henry Becque. His greatest success as a playwright was achieved with Les Affaires sont les affaires (1903; “Business Is Business”).

Although his early works show evidence of anti-Semitism, Mirbeau in the 1890s became an outspoken supporter of French army officer Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus Affair.