FAIT DU SOIR Three dates and a Carré d’art dedicated to Goncourt

Since 1903, the Goncourt prize has distinguished the “best novel” published in the year, favoring “youth” and “originality of talent” to the maximum. Two writers from Nîmes have been awarded: Marc Bernard in 1942 and Jean Carrière in 1972. An exhibition retracing these great dates is being set up at the Carré d’art in Nîmes until 29 January.

Before these winning authors, another character linked to the city of Nîmes played a leading role in the prehistory of the prize: Alphonse Daudet, executor of Goncourt’s will, whose definitive draft dates back to 1892. In reality, therefore, there are three dates that are celebrated through this exhibition: 1892, 1942 and 1972. Three anniversaries that mark the history of relations between Nîmes and Goncourt.

From the outset the visitor is put in the mood. Gard’s authors are a hit and, surprise, thereThe best-selling Goncourt is Gard. We all have in mind the exceptional figures of Hervé Le Tellier’s novel, which has reached one million copies in large format. This also makes him the best-selling Goncourt after … drum roll, “L’épervier de Maheux” (two million) and Marguerite Duras’ “L’amant” (1.6 million). The sparrowhawk is the Goncourt by Jean Carrière, the latest arrival from Gard.

Alfonso Daudet

But the story goes back… It all started between Alphone Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt. Coming from the small Lorraine aristocracy, Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules de Goncourt (1830-1870) were able, thanks to their income, to dedicate themselves together to what they loved: writing novels, collecting antiquities, literary and worldly socializing. The latter who feed the acid pen of their newspaper. Reactionaries in politics, moderns in literature, supporters of “naturalism” whose principles are set out in the preface to Germinie Lacerteux (1864), this book which “comes from the street” and is inspired by the double life of their servant.

Edmond de Goncourt befriended Alphonse Daudet in 1874. He took him with him every Thursday to Brébant’s “five o’clock dinner”, where they met Flaubert, Zola and the Russian writer Tourgueniev. The young southerner shines there with his liveliness, his humor, the beauty of him. Naturally, Alphonse is every Sunday at the “Grenier” d’Auteuil where Edmond has met his guests, exclusively men, since 1884, just as Edmond assiduously frequents the salon that Julia, Alphonse’s wife, keeps in their apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Germain , or country parties at their home in Champrosay, Draveil.

The closeness of the two men is great and Alphonse seems to play the role of the brother who died prematurely with the firstborn. Edmond writes in his diary on August 6, 1885: “I told Daudet today that his intimacy had given me a second youth of spirit, that he was, after my brother, the only being against whose spirit my spirit loved to “beat the lighter“.

The privileged links that unite Edmond to Alphonse, the literary stature of the novelist (he is the author who sells the most with Zola) make Daudet the ideal profile to preside over the future literary society, even if the latter remains rather skeptical about the project. de Goncourt and rather looking, without saying too much, from the side of the French Academy, this “loving old whore“Hated by Goncourt.

In severe pain since 1885, Alphonse Daudet died a year and a half after his friend, not having had time to sit down at the Academy. His son Léon, writer and far-right polemicist, replaced him and was one of his most influential members until his death in 1942.

Mark Bernard

Marc Bernard won the Goncourt prize in 1942 for his novel “Pareils à des enfants” in which he reported his sensitivity and the gaze of his child with great acuity. The autobiographical novel takes place in Nîmes, the city of his youth.

Nothing predestines Marc Bernard, who comes from the working class, to become a recognized writer, if not his love for people, a great curiosity and a heightened sense of observation. He is integrated into the literary environment of the capital thanks to the publication of his first novel “Zig-Zag” (1929) which Jean Paulhan, another Nîmes resident in Paris, is responsible for publishing at the NRF.

At first close to communism and surrealism, he gradually moved away from them, while participating as a literary critic in Henri Barbusse’s magazine Monde and defending “proletarian literature”. He then focused more on his writing career.

When his name is proposed for the Goncourt prize, the writer from Nîmes finds it hard to believe it and, until the end, the suspense remains intact”… here I am in full fever. My supporters excite me with shouts and gestures“, he wrote to Paulhan on December 4, 1942. During the voting of the jury, he was proposed and supported by the Gardois Léo Larguier and by Roland Dorgeles. He was elected in the first round by seven votes against three (one entry is attributed to Germaine Beaumont for “Du Rebatet pour les décombres”). He thus receives the second award of his career, after having obtained the Interallié prize in 1934 for “Anny”.

This recognition is timely. His wife Elsa is Jewish and the couple now have the means, thanks to the prize money, to escape persecution more easily. However, the edition was not favored by the period which experienced a shortage of paper. Of all the winning works, “Pareils à des enfants” is the one with the least number of copies published.

In addition to novels (Les exilés, La cendre, La mort de la bien-aimée), some of which are autobiographical, Marc Bernard has also written plays (Les voix and Le carafon), essays (Working days of 9 and 12 February, Sarcellopolis, Attack!…), chronicle (Rencontres et Vacances…).

John Career

Jean Carrière was born on August 6, 1928 in Nîmes. His mother is a professional musician, his father a conductor. His childhood was happy, his parents showed him much affection. He learns very early to love, even to adore the places where he lives, especially the scrubland around Nîmes. In his writings he will identify his childhood with a “kingdom”, which he will say he lost when he went to Paris in 1953 to be a music critic and literary columnist on the radio.

Jean Carrière’s life experienced a real turning point when he became Jean Giono’s private secretary, in Manosque, in 1956. It was by meeting the man who called himself an “immobile traveller” that Jean Carrière decided to devote himself to writing. .

A first novel was published in 1967. Return to Uzès, winner of the prize of the French Academy. The book thus achieved a real success with critics and the public, but nothing comparable to “L’épervier de Maheux”, published in 1972 which won the Goncourt prize and would sell, in large format, almost two million copies.

With “L’épervier de Maheux”, Jean Carrière tried to write a harsh and dark metaphysical novel. His action is anchored in a territory, that of the Cévennes, but his purpose goes well beyond simple regionalist concerns and any desire for the picturesque.

Jean Carrière thus works in line with his models, Jean Giono at the forefront, as well as William Faulkner and the novelists of the American Deep South.

For the author of “L’épervier de Maheux”, the truly phenomenal success of his book is the trigger for a long episode of depression and creative sterility. Jean Carrière also suffers from being mistaken for a sort of “local” writer, when he is not at all what he tries to be. He will refer to this painful experience in 1987 in “Le Prix d’un Goncourt”.

Despite his depressive period, Jean Carrière published “La caverne des pestiférés” in 1979, where he once again staged the Cévennes plateau. Other novels and essays followed, until his death in 2005. On the death of Jean Carrière, Julien Gracq wrote: “True literature hardly finds a fighter so fiery and so fully committed to it.“