Jules Janin  

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"et en effet quel époque s'est jamais plus souillée de livres obscènes que ce grand siècle? Diderot lui-même, le sublime bonhomme, n'a-t-il pas écrit un méchant livre de sottises sans esprit intitulé : les Bijoux indiscrets? ... Dans un pareil débordement d'écrits licencieux, et quand les plus grands hommes littéraires, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, sacrifait au gout du jour ..."

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Jules Janin (1804 - 1874) was a French writer and critic best remembered for his novel The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman (1827) and his writing on Marquis de Sade.

Contents

Biography

Born at Saint-Étienne (Loire), his father was a lawyer, and he was well educated, first at St.Étienne, and then at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He betook himself to journalism very early, and worked on the Figaro, the Quotidienne, etc., until in 1830 he became dramatic critic of the Journal des Débats. Long before this, however, he had made a considerable literary reputation, for which indeed his strange novel L'Ane mort et la femme guillotinée ("The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman") (1827) would have sufficed. La Confession (1830), which followed, was less remarkable in substance but even more so in style; and in Barnave (1831) he attacked the Orléans family.

From the day, however, when Janin became the theatrical critic of the Débats, though he continued to write books indefatigably, he was to most Frenchmen a dramatic critic and nothing more. He was outrageously inconsistent, and judged things from no general point of view whatsoever, though his judgment was usually good-natured. Few journalists have ever been masters of a more attractive fashion of saying the first thing that came into their heads.

He wrote the text for the song Chant des chemins de fer by Hector Berlioz, a fellow critic at the Débats.

After many years of feuilleton writing he collected some of his articles in the work called Histoire de la littérature dramatique en France (1853-1858). In 1865 he made his first attempt upon the Academy, but was not successful till five years later. Meanwhile he had not been content with his feuilletons, written persistently about all manner of things. No one was more in request with the Paris publishers for prefaces, letterpress to illustrated books and such trifles.

He travelled (picking up in one of his journeys a curious windfall, a country house at Lucca, in a lottery), and wrote accounts of his travels; he wrote numerous tales and novels, and composed many other works, including Fin d'un monde et du neveu de Rameau (1861), in which, under the guise of a sequel to Diderot's masterpiece, he showed his great familiarity with the late 18th century. He married in 1841; his wife had money, and he was always in easy circumstances. In the early part of his career he had many quarrels, notably one with Felix Pyat (1810-1889), whom he prosecuted successfully for defamation of character. For the most part his work is mere improvisation, and has few elements of vitality except a light and vivid style. His Œuvres choisies (12 vols., 1875-1878) were edited by A de la Fitzelière.

A study on Janin with a bibliography was published by Auguste Piédagnel in 1874. See also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, ii. and v., and Gustave Planche, Portraits littéraires.

Goethe on Janin

"Goethe seems to have overlooked the very elements that caused Notre Dame to live. The work he preferred to it, Jules Janin's parody, has been forgotten. --Books Abroad [1]

Works

Ouvrages

  • 1826 : Talma et Lekain
  • 1827 : L'Âne mort et la femme guillotinée
  • 1829 : Tableaux anecdotiques de la littérature française depuis François ITemplate:Er
  • 1830 : La Confession
  • 1831 : Barnave
  • 1832 : Contes fantastiques - Histoire du théâtre à quatre sous
  • 1833 : Contes nouveaux
  • 1834 : Voyage de Victor Ogier en Orient - Cours sur l’histoire du journal en France
  • 1836 : Le Chemin de traverse
  • 1837 : Fontainebleau, Versailles, Paris - Un cœur pour deux amours - Histoire de France (texte explicatif des galeries de Versailles) (1837-1843)
  • 1839 : Les Catacombes - Versailles et son musée historique - Voyage en Italie
  • 1842 : La Normandie historique, pittoresque et monumentale - Le prince royal - Une heure à Paris
  • 1843 : Un été à Paris
  • 1844 : Les Beautés de l’Opéra - La Bretagne historique
  • 1847 : Suite de l’histoire du chevalier Desgrieux et de Manon Lescaut - Voyage de Paris à la mer - Le gâteau des rois
  • 1850 : La Religieuse de Toulouse
  • 1851 : Les Gaîtés champêtres - Le mois de mai à Londres
  • 1853 : Histoire de la littérature dramatique (6 vol. 1853-1858) - Almanach de la littérature, du théâtre et des beaux-arts (1853-1865)
  • 1855 : La Comtesse d’Egmont
  • 1856 : Les Petits Bonheurs
  • 1857 : Les Symphonies de l’hiver
  • 1858 : Rachel et la tragédie - Ovide, ou le poète en exil
  • 1859 : Critique, portraits et caractères contemporains - Variétés littéraires
  • 1860 : Les Contes du chalet
  • 1861 : La Fin d'un monde et du neveu de Rameau - La Semaine des trois jeudis
  • 1862 : Contes non estampillés
  • 1864 : Les Oiseaux bleus - La poésie et l’éloquence à Rome, au temps des Césars - La Révolution française
  • 1866 : L’Amour des livres - Béranger et son temps - Le Talisman
  • 1867 : Les Amours du chevalier de Fosseuses - La Sorbonne et les gazeliers - Circé
  • 1868 : Le Bréviaire du roi de Prusse
  • 1869 : L’Interné - Lamartine - Petits romans d’hier et d’aujourd’hui - Les révolutions du pays des Gagas
  • 1870 : Le Crucifix d’argent - Le livre
  • 1871 : Alexandre Dumas - La Muette
  • 1872 : François Ponsard
  • 1874 : La Femme à l’œillet rouge - Paris et Versailles il y a cent ans
  • 1876-1878 : Œuvres diverses - Œuvres de jeunesse
  • 1884 : Causeries littéraires et historiques - Contes, nouvelles et récits




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