Edmond About Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Edmond Francois Valentin About was born on 14 February 1828 in Dieuze, a small town in the Moselle region of northeastern France. He came of age in a period of political upheaval and intellectual ferment that shaped the ambitions of many young Frenchmen eager to make their mark through letters, scholarship, or public life. Gifted with a quick wit and a strong classical education, he advanced rapidly through his studies and entered the Ecole normale superieure in Paris in 1848. There he received rigorous training for a career in teaching and scholarship, while also discovering a taste for satire and polemics that would inform his later journalism and fiction.

Greek Years and Early Reputation
After completing his formal studies, About joined the French School at Athens in the early 1850s, part of a generation of young scholars sent to Greece for archaeological and historical research. The experience gave him first-hand knowledge of the modern Greek kingdom and its institutions. He transformed his notes and observations into La Grece contemporaine (1854), a bracingly critical portrait of a new state still struggling to build stable governance. The book, admired in France for its clarity and verve, was controversial in Greece for its irreverent tone. The episode fixed his public persona: a brilliant stylist, confident in judgment, and unapologetically satirical.

Novelist and Satirist
About quickly turned to fiction. Tolla (1855), an early novel set in Italy, attracted readers with its polished style but also launched a scandal over sources and authenticity that he rebutted in the press. The controversy ensured notoriety and kept him at the center of Parisian debate. He followed with Le Roi des montagnes (1856), an adventure novel set in Greece that combined brisk plotting with a comic eye for social types; it became one of his most enduringly popular works. He displayed a talent for playful scientific fantasy in L'Homme a l'oreille cassee (1861), and for social satire in Le Nez d'un notaire (1862). Across these books he cultivated a prose marked by speed, economy, and a gleam of irony, often favoring vivid scenes and rapid dialogue over elaborate psychological analysis.

Polemics, Public Questions, and Anticlericalism
Alongside fiction, About embraced the role of publicist. He wrote essays and pamphlets on European affairs, education, and religion, and he entered the fiercest debates of the Second Empire. La Question romaine, published at the end of the 1850s, argued against the temporal power of the papacy and in favor of a modern political settlement in Italy. The book's anticlerical thrust drew retaliations from Catholic polemicists; among them, Louis Veuillot, the formidable editor of L'Univers, traded blows with About in pamphlets and columns. About insisted on the compatibility of modern civic institutions with individual belief and on the need to limit clerical influence in public life. Even those who disliked his tone recognized the lucidity and force of his argumentative style.

Journalist and Editor
As a journalist, About contributed regularly to the Parisian press. He wrote theater notices, political articles, and feuilletons for prominent newspapers, including Le Figaro, whose enterprising publisher Hippolyte de Villemessant gathered lively pens to shape the paper's wit and influence. After the fall of the Second Empire and the disasters of 1870, 1871, About threw his energy into the journalism of the early Third Republic. He helped give direction to a new daily, Le XIXe Siecle, eventually serving as its leading voice. In its pages he advocated a practical, moderate republicanism: parliamentary stability, secular public instruction, economic modernization, and a foreign policy defined by prudence rather than romantic adventure. The loss of his native Moselle to the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War left a lasting mark, and his articles often returned to the themes of national reconstruction and civic cohesion.

Style, Networks, and Readers
About moved with ease in the interconnected worlds of publishers, critics, and editors that structured literary life in nineteenth-century Paris. Major publishing houses, including Michel Levy Freres, brought his novels to a broad audience and encouraged translation and serialization that amplified his profile abroad. At home, his reputation depended as much on his quick turn of phrase in the daily press as on his books. He knew how to address readers who wanted to be informed and entertained at once, and he honed a voice that blended confident generalization with concrete anecdote. Admirers praised his clearness and vivacity; detractors accused him of glibness. Even in dispute, he tended to come off as lively and self-possessed, a quality that kept him in demand across genres for three decades.

Recognition and Final Years
By the 1880s About stood as a prominent figure in French letters, known for novels that continued to circulate and for a sustained record of public engagement. In 1884 he was elected to the Academie francaise, an acknowledgment by his peers of his place in national culture. The honor came late, after years of steady production and polemical combat, and it crowned a career that had traversed scholarship, travel writing, fiction, and political commentary with consistent intelligence and nerve. He died in Paris on 16 January 1885.

Legacy
Edmond About's legacy rests on the double achievement of stylistic brilliance and civic engagement. For readers of fiction, he left brisk, inventive novels such as Le Roi des montagnes and L'Homme a l'oreille cassee that retain their charm. For historians of the nineteenth century, he exemplifies the writer as public actor: a man of letters who could pivot from archaeology to foreign affairs, from feuilleton to pamphlet, from romantic narrative to practical politics. His sparring with figures like Louis Veuillot and his work with organs such as Le Figaro and Le XIXe Siecle show how personal voice, institutional platforms, and national debates intertwined in the formation of public opinion. Elected to the Academie francaise shortly before his death, he secured formal recognition for a career spent bringing clarity and sparkle to questions that mattered to his contemporaries, from the fate of modern Greece to the moral and institutional shape of France under the Third Republic.

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