FR 427 – Week 8

Art, Politics, and Polemics:

The Case of Octave Mirbeau

Dr Jessica Wardhaugh

Léon Daudet on Mirbeau‘Il détestait les gendarmes, les douaniers, les contrôleurs, les rentiers, les huissiers, les concierges, les domestiques. Il professait qu’un préfet est presque toujours un inverti et un incestueux, et qu’un ministre est, par définition, un voleur. Mais la démocratie lui était odieuse, les hommes de loi et les financiers le faisaient vomir. De sorte qu’il n’avait plus d’indulgence que pour les enfants, les vagabonds, les très jeunes femmes, cinq ou six peintres et sculpteurs, et les chiens.’ (Souvenirs, 1926)

Lecture plan• I. MIRBEAU: EARLY INFLUENCES•  Family background•  Political engagement • II. JOURNALIST, NOVELIST, ANARCHIST•  Politics and fiction•  Mirbeau and the anarchist milieu

• III. MIRBEAU AND THE THEATRE• ‘ Social theatre’• Critical responses

I. Mirbeau: early influences• Born 1848 (Calvados) to a

conservative, middle-class family

• Educated by Jesuits at Vannes• Served in Franco-Prussian war• Wrote for royalist and

Bonapartist newspapers in the early Third Republic

• As a civil servant, he worked for the Paris Stock Exchange

Mirbeau on Zola’s Germinal

‘Il nous en reste un sentiment de terreur profonde, et aussi une pitié douloureuse, pour ces déshérités des joies terrestres…’

II. Journalist, novelist, anarchist

• In the 1880s, when he became attracted to anarchism, Mirbeau’s writing began to engage closely with his social and political concerns

• Influenced by ‘social’ literature, his novels satirized social structures, types, and sentiments in contemporary France

• Le Calvaire was shaped by his experience of the Franco-Prussian war; Abbé Jules had an anarchist priest as its protagonist; Sébastien Roch told the tragic tale of a young man abused in a Jesuit college

Gilbert Chaitin on literature and religion in the Third Republic

‘The perceived loss of an absolute source or truth and guarantor of social cohesion in the form of Catholicism and the monarchy awakened in French consciousness a sense of the contingency of symbolic systems, of the Other’s feet of clay. In each of the four model novels I will examine a rent is opened up in the fabric of the regnant symbolic system that threatens to expose the traumatic Real that system serves to shield from view. For Bourget and Barrès, it is Enlightenment science and universalism that rings hollow; for France and Zola it is God, Catholicism and spiritualism that are mere covers for emptiness.’

Key themes in Mirbeau’s writing• The revolt of the individual against

the society from which he has come: its values, training, and institutions

• Unfinished creation; destruction as a means of renewal (emphasized by Robert Ziegler)

• E.g. Le Jardin des supplices (1899) suggests (in anarchist vein) that violence is inevitable in the destruction of the old order

• Disintegration is also explored in his later works, e.g. La 628-E8 (1907) (about an anarchist car) and Dingo (1913) (about a destructive dog)

Mirbeau’s journalism• In the 1880s, Jean Grave began

corresponding with Mirbeau about his journalism, some of which was reprinted in La Révolte

• Mirbeau’s article La Grève des électeurs was so popular that it was reprinted as an anarchist pamphlet (20,000 copies produced)

• Mirbeau courted controversy by opposing the death sentence for anarchist terrorists such as Ravachol and Vaillant

Mirbeau and popular theatre

• ‘Nous dirons des vers, des proses devant le peuple et, pour témoigner hautement de notre haine envers le corrupteur moderne: l’Argent, nos représentations seront gratuites.’ (Le Théâtre civique)

• Mirbeau supported the Théâtre civique and played the part of the mayor in their performance of his play L’Épidémie in 1900

• He was also on the Committee for Popular Theatre, and was more broadly interested in bringing theatre to working people and in addressing their lives and concerns on stage

III. Mirbeau as playwright• Les Mauvais Bergers was his first

full-length play• There are some strong parallels

with Zola’s Germinal (Mirbeau had been moved by the novel and the later dramatic version): the struggle between labour and capital, a love affair between a militant and a working-class girl, impassioned relationships between the militants and the crowd

Jean Grave to Mirbeau, 1893

‘La portée de votre pièce sera bien plus grande si la morale découle de l’action elle-même. Les tirades sont bonnes pour le livre de discussion, mais pour le roman, et le théâtre surtout, une situation bien décrite, une opposition de scènes bien dessinées, sont bien meilleures à mon avis.’

Octave Mirbeau, Les Mauvais Bergers

• Jean Roule: ‘Ils ne savent pas ce que c’est que le sacrifice. Ils s’effarent devant la faim... et tremblent devant la mort!

• Madeleine: ‘Aimez la mort! La mort est splendide! ... nécessaire... et divine! Elle enfante la vie!’

Emile de Saint-Auban‘M. Mirbeau le connaît bien, ce frère de sa fantaisie; dans ces procès fameux, il lui porta son témoignage; jadis, il fit et refit son portrait en des articles frémissants.... ces articles, leur verbe haut, leur psychologie dramatique, je les retrouve dans la passion nerveuse, la vibration sonore des Mauvais Bergers. Lorsque je défendais Jean Grave, M. Mirbeau créait Jean Roule...’

Les Mauvais Bergers on stage

• The play was performed at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris, with the renowned Sarah Bernhardt as Madeleine and Lucien Guitry as Jean Roule

• It was seen and debated by some of the best-known critics of the day

• But Mirbeau achieved greater critical acclaim and popular success with Les Affaires sont les affaires

E. Dargan on Les Affaires, 1906

‘The commercial question, we are sufficiently aware, is the question of the day. Finance is the all-absorbing thing. The man of affairs is the protagonist, if not the hero, of his time. Any play, therefore, which portrays principally such a character , his atmosphere and his relations, must be accorded a burning actuality. And such a play is Les Affaires. Concerning its novelty or originality, there would be more to say. It has been anticipated for some time by such dramas as Mercadet, La Question d’Argent, Mlle de la Sieglière, Le Gendre de M. Poirier, or Mlle de Marni. Yet in the one result which it set out to achieve, Les Affaires remains perhaps supreme.’

Mirbeau’s one-act plays• Satirical depictions of bourgeois

townsfolk: L’Épidémie• Cynical portrayals of married life:

Vieux ménage• Anarchistic treatment of the police

and judicial system: Le Portefeuille and Interview

• Six of these short plays were published together in 1904 as Farces et moralités

Mirbeau on the social question:

‘Si je l’avais, cette solution, croyez que ce n’est point au théâtre que je l’eusse portée, c’est dans la vie!’