Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly

Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly was a French novelist, short story writer and literary critic of the nineteenth century. He wrote in French during a period when Romanticism was giving way to Realism, and his work sits between the two. He is best remembered for his tales of mystery, in which evil is hinted at rather than explained, and for his influence on later writers such as Léon Bloy and Marcel Proust.

He was born in 1808 at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Lower Normandy, into a provincial family of minor nobility. The d'Aurevilly part of his name came later, an inheritance from a childless uncle. He studied at the Collège Stanislas in Paris and then law at the University of Caen, where he took his degree. As a young man he called himself a liberal and an atheist, and his early writings treat religion as a force that only complicates human affairs. In the early 1840s he began to visit a Catholic and royalist salon linked to a niece of Joseph de Maistre, and in 1846 he converted to Roman Catholicism. The conversion did not dull his fascination with darkness: his fiction keeps returning to guilt, passion and crime.

His real success as a writer came from 1852 onwards, when he became an influential critic for a Bonapartist newspaper. From that platform he helped rehabilitate Balzac and championed Stendhal, Flaubert and Baudelaire. His criticism, gathered into the long series Les Œuvres et les Hommes, is known for its sharpness and brilliance. Paul Bourget saw him as an idealist who found in writing a refuge from a world he disliked, while Jules Lemaître judged his heroes' crimes and his snobbery a caricature of Byronism.

Barbey carefully built a public image as a dandy, with an aristocratic manner and a hint of a mysterious past, although his family was provincial bourgeois nobility. His stories and novels often unfold in the aristocratic society of Normandy, inspired by Valognes. He never wrote in the Norman patois himself, but his example encouraged a revival of vernacular writing in his home region. Today he is seen as a key figure of late Romanticism, admired by the decadents of the fin de siècle and still read for his mixture of irony, Catholic conviction and taste for the unsettling.