Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), French author of the naturalistic

school who is generally considered the greatest French short story
writer.

Guy de Maupassant was probably born at the Château de Miromesniel,

Dieppe on August 5, 1850. In 1869 Maupassant started to study law in
Paris, but soon, at the age of 20, he volunteered to serve in the army
during the Franco-Prussian War. Between the years 1872 and 1880
Maupassant was a civil servant, first at the ministry of maritime affairs,
then at the ministry of education.

Starting in 1875, the famous French novelist Flaubert1 became

Maupassant’s literary mentor. At first, Maupassant slavishly imitated his
master’s style, but gradually he began to explore themes and situations
such as the tragic effect of war and occupation on French society,
which Flaubert had chosen not to treat. Maupassant received further
intellectual stimulation by frequenting Flaubert’s weekly literary salon,
which was attended at various times by such eminent writers as
Turgenev, Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Edmond de Goncourt and Jules
de Goncourt. In late 1879, Maupassant and five other French authors
agreed that each would write a short story on the Prussian occupation
of France for a volume to be entitled Les Soirées de Médan (1880; the
evenings in Médan). Maupassant’s contribution was “Boule de Suif.” The other contributors to this volume were
Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Alexis, Henry Céard, and Léon Hennique. Almost all critics agreed with
Flaubert’s assessment that “Boule de Suif” was “a masterpiece of composition and wit.” This extremely
favorable reaction encouraged Maupassant to become a very prolific writer of short stories and novels.

1
Gustave Flaubert (/floʊˈbɛər/;[1] French: [ɡystav flobɛʁ]; 12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) was an influential French novelist who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary
realism of his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics.
The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
During the 1880s Maupassant created some 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of
verse. In tone, his tales were marked by objectivity, highly controlled style, and sometimes by sheer comedy.
Usually they were built around simple episodes from everyday life, which revealed the hidden sides of people.
Among Maupassant's best-known books are Une Vie (A Woman's Life, 1883), about the frustrating existence of
a Norman wife and Bel-Ami (1885), which depicts an unscrupulous journalist. Pierre Et Jean (1888) was a
psychological study of two brothers. Maupassant's most upsetting horror story, Le Horla (1887), was about
madness and suicide.

Maupassant had suffered from syphilis since his 20s which doctors failed to diagnose. The disease later caused
increasing mental disorder - also seen in his nightmarish stories, which have much in common with Edgar Allan
Poe's supernatural visions. Critics have charted Maupassant's developing illness through his semi-
autobiographical stories of abnormal psychology, but the theme of mental disorder is present even in his first
collection, La Maison Tellier (1881), published at the height of his health.

On January 2, in 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat and was committed to the
celebrated private asylum of Dr. Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died on July 6, 1893.

http://www.online-literature.com/maupassant/

19th-century French literature

French literature enjoyed enormous international prestige and success in the 19th century. The first part of the century was dominated
by Romanticism, until around the mid-century Realism emerged, at least partly as a reaction. In the last half of the century, "naturalism",
"parnassian"2 poetry, and "symbolism", among other styles, were often competing tendencies at the same time. Some writers did form into

2
Parnassianism (Parnasse) was a literary style characteristic of certain French poetry during the positivist period of the 19th century, occurring after romanticism and prior
to symbolism. The name is derived from the original Parnassian poets' journal, Le Parnasse contemporain, itself named after Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses of Greek
mythology. The anthology was first issued in 1866, then again in 1869 and 1876, including poems by Charles Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Sully Prudhomme, Stéphane
Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, François Coppée and José María de Heredia.
The Parnassians were influenced by Théophile Gautier and his doctrine of "art for art's sake". As a reaction to the less disciplined types of romantic poetry, and what they considered
the excessive sentimentality and undue social and political activism of Romantic works, the Parnassians strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and classical
subjects which they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment. Elements of this detachment were derived from the philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer.
literary groups defined by a name and a program or manifesto. In other cases, these expressions were merely pejorative terms given by
critics to certain writers or have been used by modern literary historians to group writers of divergent projects or methods. Nevertheless,
these labels can be useful in describing broad historical developments in the arts.

19 th-century French literature concerns the developments in French literature during a dynamic period in French history that saw the
rise of Democracy and the fitful end of Monarchy and Empire. The period covered spans the following political regimes: Napoleon
Bonaparte's Consulate (1799–1804) and Empire (1804–1814), the Restoration under Louis XVIII and Charles X (1814–1830), the July
Monarchy under Louis Philippe d'Orléans (1830–1848), the Second Republic (1848–1852), the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1852–
1871), and the first decades of the Third Republic (1871–1940).

La théorisation de « l'art pour l'art » est attribuée à Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). Elle apparait dans la préface de Mademoiselle de Maupin en 1834 :
« À quoi bon la musique ? à quoi bon la peinture ? Qui aurait la folie de préférer Mozart à M. Carrel, et Michel-Ange à l’inventeur de la moutarde blanche ? Il n’y a de vraiment beau
que ce qui ne peut servir à rien ; tout ce qui est utile est laid, [...] Je préfère à certain vase qui me sert un vase chinois, semé de dragons et de mandarins, qui ne me sert pas du
tout1. »
Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in
Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. It was partly a
reaction to the Industrial Revolution,[1] the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the
scientific rationalization of nature.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on
historiography,[3] education,[4] and the natural sciences.[5] It had a significant and complex effect on politics, and while for much of the
Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, its long-term effect on the growth of nationalism was perhaps more
significant.

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions
as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of
the sublimity and beauty of nature. It considered folk art and ancient custom to be noble statuses, but also valued spontaneity, as in the
musicalimpromptu. In contrast to the rational and Classicist ideal models, Romanticism revived medievalism[6] and elements of art and
narrative perceived to be authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism.

Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of
the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the French Revolutionwere also proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high value to
the achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society. It also promoted
the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to
historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas. In the second half of the 19th century, Realism was offered
as a polar opposite to Romanticism.[7] The decline of Romanticism during this time was associated with multiple processes, including social
and political changes and the spread of nationalism.[8]

Literary realism is part of the realist art movement beginning with mid nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal), and Russian
[1]

literature (Alexander Pushkin) and extending to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. [citation needed] Literary realism, in contrast to
idealism, attempts to represent familiar things as they are. [2] Realist authors chose to depict everyday and banal activities and experiences,
instead of using a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation. Literary critic Ian Watt, however, dates the origins of realism in United
Kingdom to the early 18th-century novel.[3] Subsequent related developments in the arts are naturalism, social realism, and in the
1930s, socialist realism.
Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1930s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions,
heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was a mainly unorganized literary movement that sought
to depict believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly
symbolic, idealistic or even supernatural treatment.

Naturalism was an outgrowth of literary realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere. Naturalistic
writers were influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.[1] They often believed that one's heredity and social environment largely
determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine
"scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g. the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often include
uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, Émile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive
pessimism. Thomas Hardy can also be grouped under the umbrella of naturalism, because of his realistic outlook on life evidenced in
novels such as Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism,
violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing too
much on human vice and misery.

Symbolism, ]a loosely organized literary and artistic movement that originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to
painting and the theatre, and influenced the European and American literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. Symbolist artists sought
to express individual emotional experience through the subtle and suggestive use of highly symbolized language. The principal Symbolist poets
include the Frenchmen Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Henri de Régnier, René Ghil, and Gustave Kahn.