Henri-Alban Fournier

Background

Henri-Alban Fournier was born on October 3, 1886, in La Chapelle- D’Angillon, in France. He was born in the central French province of Berry, as the first child of a pair of teachers. He spent his childhood with his younger sister Isabel in the countryside.

Education

At 12, Alain-Fournier was transferred to a private boarding school, the Lycée Voltaire, in Paris. He then studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris, where he prepared for the entrance examination to the École Normale Supérieure, but without success. He then studied at the merchant marine school in Brest.

Career

Alain-Fournier visited the pilgrimage of Lourdes, which impressed him, since 1906, he had attacked piety. At the end of 1907, he published the first long text under the pseudonym Alain-Fournier: the essay Le Corps de la femme (“The Body of a Woman”), with a theme which he probably was not yet very familiar with. In 1909, by the end of his military service, he also tried to revoke the license in order to become an English teacher. Apparently, however, he was poorly prepared and failed.

Returning to Paris, he was an independent literary critic of the Paris-Journal from April 1910 to 1912. At the end of 1910, he met the 13-year-old novelist Charles Peguy, who tried to trace him back to the Catholic piety of his childhood. Through him, he received not laborious post of personal secretary with the banker Claude Casimir-Perrier, whom he had held since 1912.

During these years, he wrote a novel that was supposed to make him famous: Le grand Meaulnes (the Great Meulns). It first appeared in five sequels from July to November 1913, in the young magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française, in which Rivière's son-in-law was the secretary of the editorial board since last year. In the fall, he came out in the form of a book. The success was immediately significant, he came to the narrowest choice for the Prix Goncourt.

When World War I began on August 1, 1914, Alain-Fournier was called up as a lieutenant. In the battles for Eparge, south of Verdun, he did not return with his men from the patrol on September 22 and went missing. Only in 1991, thanks to an identification tag, his remains were found in a mass grave and reburied at the military cemetery in Saint-Remy-la-Calonne.

Achievements

• Henri Alban Fournier, also known as Alain-Fournier, was a French literary talent whose life was cut short by World War I. Before meeting his demise in the trenches in 1914, Alain-Fournier had produced a novel, as well as several poems and short stories and an array of letters and newspaper articles.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Lost Estate
  • The Wanderer
  • Poems

Views

Alain-Fournier was particularly concerned with the theme of lost innocence. In his free verse, written between 1904 and 1906 and unpublished in his lifetime, he deals with this nostalgic theme extensively.

Alain-Fournier was attempting to counter Pierre Lous, who had praised the female nude and had written captions for pornographic pictures of women. According to Alain-Fournier, women should remain pure and would compromise that purity if they posed nude.

Connections

On the Ascension Day of 1905, when he was a little less than 19 years old, Alain-Fournier had a fleeting meeting with a young woman, Yvonne de Quevrekur, with whom he fell in love. He lost sight of her after another short meeting, and two years later he was disappointed that she got married. He also had a very changeable relationship with fashionist Jeanne Bruno.

beloved:

Yvonne Marie Elise Toussaint de Quiévrecourt

March 31, 1885-December 29, 1964

Friend:

Jacques Riviere

15 July 1886 – 14 February 1925

At the Lacanal Lycée in Sko near Paris, Alain-Fournier became friends with Jacques Riviere, with whom he became interested in literature and began working.

References

• The End of Youth: The Life And Work of Alain-fournier