François Mauriac

born Oct.
11, 1885, Bordeaux, France
died Sept. 1, 1970, Paris
novelist, essayist, poet, playwright,
journalist, and winner in 1952 of the Nobel
Prize for Literature. He belonged to the
lineage of French Catholic writers who
examined the ugly realities of modern life
in the light of eternity. His major novels
are sombre, austere psychological dramas set
in an atmosphere of unrelieved tension. At
the heart of every work Mauriac placed a
religious soul grappling with the problems
of sin, grace, and salvation.
Mauriac
came from a pious and strict
upper-middle-class family. He studied at the
University of Bordeaux and entered the École
Nationale des Chartes at Paris in 1906, soon
deserting it to write. His first published
work was a volume of delicately fervent
poems, Les Mains jointes (1909; “Joined
Hands”). Mauriac’s vocation, however, lay
with the novel. L’Enfant chargé de chaînes
(1913; Young Man in Chains) and La Robe
prétexte (1914; The Stuff of Youth), his
first works of fiction, showed a still
uncertain technique but, nevertheless, set
the pattern for his recurring themes. His
native city of Bordeaux and the drab and
suffocating strictures of bourgeois life
provide the framework for his explorations
of the relations of characters deprived of
love. Le Baiser au lépreux (1922; The Kiss
to the Leper) established Mauriac as a major
novelist. Mauriac showed increasing mastery
in Le Désert de l’amour (1925; The Desert of
Love) and in Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927;
Thérèse), whose heroine is driven to attempt
the murder of her husband to escape her
suffocating life. Le Noeud de vipères (1932;
Vipers’ Tangle) is often considered
Mauriac’s masterpiece. It is a marital
drama, depicting an old lawyer’s rancour
toward his family, his passion for money,
and his final conversion. In this, as in
other Mauriac novels, the love that his
characters seek vainly in human contacts is
fulfilled only in love of God.
In 1933
Mauriac was elected to the French Academy.
His later novels include the partly
autobiographical Le Mystère Frontenac (1933;
The Frontenac Mystery), Les Chemins de la
mer (1939; The Unknown Sea), and La
Pharisienne (1941; A Woman of the
Pharisees), an analysis of religious
hypocrisy and the desire for domination. In
1938 Mauriac turned to writing plays,
beginning auspiciously with Asmodée
(performed 1937), in which the hero is a
heinous, domineering character who controls
weaker souls. Such is also the theme of the
less successful Les Mal Aimés (1945; “The
Poorly Loved”).
A highly
sensitive man, Mauriac felt compelled to
justify himself before his critics. Le
Romancier et ses personnages (1933; “The
Novelist and His Characters”) and the four
volumes of his Journal (1934–51), followed
by three volumes of Mémoires (1959–67), tell
much of his intentions, his methods, and his
reactions to contemporary moral values.
Mauriac tackled the difficult dilemma of the
Christian writer—how to portray evil in
human nature without placing temptation
before his readers—in Dieu et Mammon (1929;
God and Mammon, 1936).
Mauriac was
also a prominent polemical writer. He
intervened vigorously in the 1930s,
condemning totalitarianism in all its forms
and denouncing Fascism in Italy and Spain.
In World War II he worked with the writers
of the Resistance. After the war he
increasingly engaged in political
discussion. He wrote De Gaulle (1964; Eng.
trans., 1966), having officially supported
him from 1962. Though Mauriac’s fame outside
France spread slowly, he was regarded by
many as the greatest French novelist after
Marcel Proust.