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.