François de Curel

• Born: June 10, 1854
• Birthplace: Metz, France
• Died: 1928
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other Literary Forms

Before becoming a playwright, François de Curel attempted for several years to write fiction. Three of his short stories appeared in French magazines between 1886 and 1894, and he published three novels: L’Été des fruits secs (1885; the summer of withered fruits), L’Orphelinat de Gaëtan (1888; the orphanage of Gaëtan), and Le Sauvetage du gran-duc (1889; the rescue of the grand duke). Charles Maurras, in reviewing the last novel, urged Curel to try writing for the theater instead—a bit of advice that Curel promptly followed.

Achievements

François de Curel was perhaps the most important new French playwright introduced by André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre , which between 1887 and 1896 freed French drama from the rigid form and trivial themes of the “well-made play” popularized by Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou. Produced at the Théâtre Libre in 1892, Curel’s A False Saint and The Fossils failed with audiences but were praised by critics—a pattern that followed him throughout his career until the last decade or so, when he finally achieved some popular success. The critical praise did gain for him entry into the more conventional Parisian theaters, where most of his subsequent plays were produced, though the spirit of the Théâtre Libre remained his chief inspiration (and indeed, Antoine acted key roles in some of his later plays). Curel viewed the theater as a place for airing serious concerns rather than for offering mere entertainment. His part in educating the French public to this view is indicated by the public acceptance of his work in the last stage of his career, when two of his plays had impressive runs and most of his earlier plays were revived.

Aside from his brief vogue and his undoubted historical significance, Curel’s achievement is problematical. He is reminiscent of a less talented Henrik Ibsen. Like the mature Ibsen, Curel presents a surface realism that is broken through by symbolism and poetic passages. Like Ibsen, Curel tends to center his plays on strong central characters. Unfortunately, Curel lacked Ibsen’s knowledge of the theater and skill in dramaturgy. Curel’s clumsiness surfaces, for example, in improbable plots, in occasionally long-winded speeches and debates, and in the way his characters sometimes announce the exposition or analyze themselves. Despite strenuous efforts to revise most of his plays after he gained experience, Curel never overcame his awkwardness. This awkwardness, combined with his shaky public reception for so long, apparently limited the dissemination of Curel’s plays outside France.

It seems unlikely that Curel’s plays will ever be revived, except possibly as camp. He wrote a drama of ideas, and his ideas are now outdated or at best quaint (he was an aristocrat and a chauvinist, both French and male). If some of Curel’s plays are ever brought to the modern stage, it will be those that best present an enduring theme: the efforts of individuals to cope with change. Among such plays are A False Saint, The Lion’s Meal, and The Beat of the Wing, but Curel’s little masterpiece on this theme is, as the title suggests, The Fossils. Generally speaking, Curel’s best plays are those in which he closely engages, either openly or in disguise, the circumstances of his own life.

Biography

The facts of François de Curel’s life have an enormous bearing on his work, explaining not only why he became a playwright but also, in many instances, his choice of themes. Curel presents the unhappy spectacle of a person caught both between two times and between two countries. As so often seems the case with artists, Curel’s art flowed out of his unhappiness. By and large, his life is a story of frustration, especially frustrated pride.

Curel would seem initially to have had little reason for frustration. On his father’s side, he was a viscount, tracing his aristocratic roots all the way back to the Crusader Gaulthier de Curel. By the time of Curel’s birth, however, the aristocracy was under attack: After repeated revolutions, republican sentiment ran high in France, serving not only to restrict the aristocracy’s actual power but also to hold the ancient privileges up to scorn.

Still, his mother’s side of the family seemed to offer ample scope for a young man’s energies: His mother’s family, the de Wendels, were rich and powerful ironmakers in Alsace-Lorraine, and it was this family industry that Curel was educated to enter. After attending the College of the Jesuits in Metz, he took a degree in metallurgical engineering from the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures at Nancy in 1876. Meanwhile, following the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the Germans had annexed the territory of Alsace-Lorraine. Before they would let him help manage the family industry, the German authorities demanded that Curel renounce his French citizenship and become an official German subject. This Curel indignantly refused to do.

Thereafter, the young French engineer with the proud heritage retreated to his estate and settled into a daily round of reading, hunting, and “living.” It seems only natural that this brooding existence would eventually lead to literary efforts, first in fiction, then in drama. Here, too, Curel seemed doomed to frustration, until after years of struggle, he submitted three plays under three different names to André Antoine at the Théâtre Libre. Antoine accepted all three (though he produced only one after he learned Curel’s stratagem), and Curel was ecstatic. Later, Curel wrote that going to Paris to help with the productions of his plays at the Théâtre Libre was among the happiest experiences of his life. Moreover, he found in Antoine a strong advocate to whom he was always thankful.

The details of Curel’s personal life are scanty. He remained a bachelor all his life. There is some evidence that Curel, a spiffy, energetic little man with almost a military bearing, was exceptionally single-minded in his pursuit of la gloire, which he finally attained in 1918 when he was elected to the French Academy. He died ten years later, after writing several more plays and seeing his complete works for the theater published between 1919 and 1924.

Analysis

The term “drama of ideas” provides a convenient starting point for understanding François de Curel’s work. Curel’s interests ranged over most of the burning issues of his day: science versus morality (La Nouvelle Idole), capital versus labor (The Lion’s Meal), savagery versus civilization (La Fille sauvage), love versus war (Terre inhumaine), patriotism and the pursuit of glory (The Beat of the Wing), the springs of artistic achievement (La Comédie du génie), and the nature and power of love (several plays).

Behind all this miscellany, however, is a strong singleness of purpose. Just as Curel became an artist to justify his existence, so the art he created strives to achieve the same aim. The issues about which Curel chose to write generally bore some relationship to his personal circumstances, and he did not so much empathize with the characters he created as create characters to express some aspect of his personality. In itself, the wide range of issues on which he focused represents the attempt of an outmoded aristocrat to cope with change, to join the life of his time, yet he did not so much join it as fight it. At heart he remained a first-class reactionary, using a since-perfected technique: While seeming to accept the new ideas, he coopted them to serve the old order.

What enabled Curel to absorb new ideas but maintain an essentially reactionary stance was his acceptance of the theory of vitalism, which was gaining ascendancy in his time over the impotent and outmoded Victorian fashion of moralizing. Encouraged by such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, reflected in the drama of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw and the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, vitalism was an amalgam of Romanticism and the new science that proved to be consistent with literary naturalism. Instead of God, vitalism posited some vague “life force” at work in the universe. In human beings, the life force expressed itself through the instincts, which were the real mainsprings of human behavior beneath all the polite and effete forms. Living right meant discovering one’s real nature and being true to it (as does Nora in Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem, pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880). Thus, Curel’s version of true love is rough-and-ready procreation; romance is a hindrance that delays, distracts, and dissipates the life force (sometimes fatally). More important, being true to one’s own nature means that a savage will return to savagery, that civilized beings will recognize the French flag as their greatest symbol, and that the cream of society—that is, the aristocracy—will rise to the top (and peasants will be peasants).

In technique, also, Curel was not as avant-garde as his initial association with the Théâtre Libre suggests. He does not indulge in the naturalistic excesses of the “slice of life” (tranche de vie); instead, his technique is a mix of the old and new that is again reminiscent of Ibsen. Like Ibsen, Curel offers a realism that is propelled by the well-oiled devices of the well-made play. In attempting to appeal to audiences who preferred not to be taxed intellectually, Curel continued to use the current tricks of the trade while aiming at raising the moral and intellectual standards of the day.

A False Saint

A False Saint was Curel’s first play to be produced. One of the three plays that the aspiring playwright submitted to Antoine at the Théâtre Libre, its 1892 production favorably impressed the critics in the audience but not the audience itself, which stamped and tried to interrupt the performance. The audience’s displeasure is understandable, because A False Saint is dominated by the powerfully negative figure of Julie Renaudin, whose character could be considered a precursor to the Nazi mentality. The play, however, did not serve as a warning of the dangers inherent in amoral vitalism when it is thwarted and perverted; instead, Julie’s destructive instincts are merely a negative testimony to the elemental power of the life force. It is a force not to be denied, one way or another.

The play begins when Julie leaves the Order of the Sacred Heart and returns home after eighteen years. A conversation between Julie and her old confidante, Aunt Noémie, reveals that Julie can now safely return, since Henri, Julie’s cousin and onetime fiancé, died three months before. Henri had jilted her and married a smart Parisian, Jeanne. In retaliation, Julie had pushed Jeanne into a ravine, causing her to give birth prematurely and almost causing the death of both mother and daughter. Still, Jeanne had not blamed Julie, nor had she betrayed her. Thereupon, Julie had entered the convent, ostensibly to expiate her guilt but in actuality, through her symbolic act of self-immolation, to stir Henri’s guilt. She succeeded, as Jeanne now tells her. Julie is pleased, but not for long. Left unable to bear another child, Jeanne told Henri of Julie’s criminal behavior. Maddened to learn this, Julie returns to her quest for revenge, this time picking on Christine, Jeanne and Henri’s daughter. Gaining the admiring girl’s confidence, Julie tries to destroy Christine’s engagement to young Georges Piérrard. Julie runs Georges off, persuades Christine that the fellow is unworthy, and causes Christine to enter the convent. Only when Christine discloses that her father’s deathbed thoughts had been full of Julie, to whom he had urged Christine to be kind, like a daughter, does Julie relent. Confessing her vengeful aims, Julie determines to reenter the convent, and Christine and Georges are left to patch things up.

Curel also patches things up somewhat with the ending of A False Saint. Combined with the play’s title and some pointed comments of young Piérrard, the perfunctory ending finally makes a muted moral judgment on Julie’s behavior. Otherwise, the play focuses too sympathetically on Julie’s bitter destructiveness, still improbably strong after eighteen years of convent life. Perhaps Curel embodied some of his own bitterness in Julie. He was also no doubt enlightened by his audience’s reception of Julie, whose essential nastiness is symbolized at the end when she squeezes a baby bird to death onstage.

The Fossils

A much more attractive work than A False Saint is The Fossils, also produced at the Théâtre Libre in 1892. Again the production failed, but this time because of poor acting; again the critics hailed Curel as a powerful new talent. Several years later, The Fossils was successfully produced by the prestigious Comédie-Française, where the play entered the repertory. Of all Curel’s plays, The Fossils is most likely to appeal to a modern audience. More tightly plotted than his usual work, The Fossils again shows Curel dealing with material close to his heart, but openly and honestly. Indeed, The Fossils dramatizes Curel’s most intense personal concern: the decline of the aristocracy.

The Fossils centers on the Duke of Chantemelle’s family, but it is clear that the Chantemelles represent a class of sociological “fossils.” Decadent and of no use to society, the Chantemelles are in danger of dying out. The only son, Robert, is dying of consumption, leaving no one to carry on the family name. Robert, however, discloses one last remaining hope: He has an illegitimate son, the result of an affair with Hélène Vatrin, his sister’s former companion. His mother, the duchess, had ejected Hélène from the family circle under mysterious circumstances, but now there is a reconciliation, an arrangement, and a marriage whereby Robert assumes paternity. After the marriage, however, Hélène’s earlier rejection comes to light. Before Robert, his father the duke had been Hélène’s lover. As the duke says, the child is “ours” in more ways than one. The tensions aroused by these family disclosures and the efforts to keep the family from crumbling not only suggest the tenuous existence of the aristocracy but also make for strong drama in the manner of Greek tragedy. Some of the tensions are relieved when the family comes together around Robert’s coffin in a powerful final scene: The family’s instinct to survive triumphs over its terrible knowledge.

In his will, read in the final scene, Robert proposes a formula whereby the aristocracy will not merely survive but will again be a force in national life. Just as Robert’s marriage with the commoner Hélène represents a compromise, so his formula represents a compromise with democratic principles. Earlier in some key imagery, Robert had expressed his preference for the Northern forest—where the tall oaks shading and protecting the undergrowth suggest the aristocracy—over the dull Riviera, where the sameness of the waves rolling in suggests the leveling effects of democracy. In his formula, Robert proposes that the hereditary aristocracy educate itself to be an aristocracy of merit so that it might survive as the big oaks do, shading and protecting the scrawny undergrowth. After all, the aristocracy might as well make itself useful, and what better way than to go on doing what comes naturally? Such was the formula that Curel also proposed in The Lion’s Meal, as an alternative to socialism, and such was apparently the formula on which he based his own life.

The Beat of the Wing

Produced at the Théâtre Antoine (the former Théâtre Libre) in 1906, with Antoine in the lead role, The Beat of the Wing was scheduled for revival in 1915 but prohibited by the wartime French censor. As a play concerning a French officer who turns against the French flag, written by a native of Alsace-Lorraine who was waiting out the war in neutral Switzerland, The Beat of the Wing did perhaps raise a few questions. Still, if the play is properly understood, the censor’s prohibition seems ludicrous. The Beat of the Wing must be one of the most fervent paeans to patriotism ever written; indeed, the patriotism expressed here might better be described as old-style chauvinism. The play is about the search for glory—which, when attained, lifts one above common humanity like an eagle carrying one aloft—but glory is narrowly defined as distinguished service to France.

At the beginning of the play, Bernard Prinson’s search for glory, as a leading French politician, is compromised by the sudden appearance of his renegade brother, Michel. A former army officer and explorer, Michel had experienced the fluttering wings of glory himself when he was hailed for conquering a rich Central African kingdom for France. Upon returning to the African kingdom, Michel promptly installed himself as dictator, committing such atrocities as those of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). His greatest atrocity, however, was to have wiped out a French expeditionary force sent to quell him. He knew that he was dead to all hope of French glory as soon as he fired on the French flag. The natives eventually rebelled, mutilated Michel, and left him for dead. Somehow he survived and made his way to London, where he lived under an assumed identity. Now, with his horribly disfigured face and uncaring reprobate manner, Michel shows up at his brother’s home just in time to embarrass Bernard politically. The outcome, however, is anticlimactic. Michel flinches every time he sees the French flag, which is often (military maneuvers are going on). All that he wants is to be accepted into humanity again. Michel gains acceptance in the person of his illegitimate daughter, Hélène, a fellow family outcast who has spent most of her life stuck away in a boarding school. They run off together at the end of the play.

Like Curel’s other works, The Beat of the Wing is notable for what it suggests, almost painfully, about its author. Again, the central figure, the jolly pariah Michel, seems to reflect Curel himself, scarred and unregenerate but still seeking acceptance and even glory. The idea of glory through service to France is consistent with Curel’s notion of an aristocracy of merit. Curel’s ideas here, however, are not sufficiently embodied in dramatic form. Too much of the play is taken up with the lengthy relation of Michel’s improbable past, and after that not much happens except for a considerable amount of discussion about glory and the flag. This diffuse form is unhappily only too typical of Curel’s dramaturgy.

Vitalism Plays

Many of Curel’s plays—and many of his weakest—center on the theme of love; of his other remaining plays, most treat issues that are related to his vitalism. La Fille sauvage (the wild girl), for example, illustrates the enduring power of natural instincts through the story of an African maiden who is rescued out of savagery, tries to adapt to civilization, and eventually chooses to return to her savage origins. Three other plays, however, suggest the sublimation of elemental instincts into higher, refined forms. La Nouvelle Idole concerns a doctor who injects with a cancer virus a girl who is dying of tuberculosis. The experiment backfires when the girl recovers from her tuberculosis; thereupon the doctor also injects himself with the deadly cancer virus. Their willing sacrifice of themselves to scientific study, submerging the individual life instinct into a concern for humanity, shows a new avenue to nobility and glory. Similar themes are developed in La Comédie du génie (the comedy of genius) and Terre inhumaine (inhuman land). Exploring the wellsprings of artistic achievement, in the person of a playwright resembling Curel himself, La Comédie du génie recommends, instead of paternity, the channeling of the love instinct into a love for humanity. Terre inhumaine treats the chance encounter, in wartime Lorraine, of a German officer’s highly born wife and a French spy who are drawn both to love and to kill each other; while deploring the ravages of war and their effect on the instinct to love, the play also demonstrates the sublimation of that instinct into a higher form: patriotism. These four plays are of mixed quality, though generally better than the plays about love. La Fille sauvage and La Comédie du génie are rambling structures, but La Nouvelle Idole and Terre inhumaine embody truly dramatic tensions.

The Lion’s Meal

Of Curel’s remaining plays, perhaps the one that is of greatest interest, and the highest quality, is The Lion’s Meal. Here the political results of Curel’s thinking are dramatized through the development of his central character, the aristocrat and industrialist Jean de Miremont. To atone for his unintentional killing of a workman, the young Jean dedicates his life to helping the workers’ cause. At first he attempts to minister to the workers with the softening influence of religion but to little avail. Nor is socialism the answer: The workers are like children, too undisciplined and irresponsible to create their own social order. Instead, Jean matures to see enlightened self-interest and paternalism as the answer. By following his natural instincts to lead and to amass profit, Jean thereby creates the industrial order whereby the workers also benefit, even if he gets the lion’s share.

The Lion’s Meal sums up Curel’s thinking nicely, spelling out the political implications only hinted at in The Fossils. Like The Fossils, The Lion’s Meal shows Curel responding directly to his own situation, trying to cope personally with the changes of his time. Whatever the merits of Curel’s solutions, it is in these plays, in which he directly engages the parameters of his own existence, that Curel is still interesting today.

Bibliography

Cardy, Michael, and Derek Connon, eds. Aspects of Twentieth Century Theatre in French. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. In its description of French theater in the twentieth century, this work provides context in which to understand Curel’s later works.

SantaVicca, Edmund F., comp. Four French Dramatists: A Bibliography of Criticism of the Works of Eugène Brieux, François de Curel, Émile Fabre, Paul Hervieu. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974. A bibliography of the criticism that has been written about Curel and three other French dramatists.

Waxman, Samuel M. Antoine and the Théâtre Libre. 1926. Reprint. New York: B. Blom, 1968. This examination of Antoine and the Théâtre Libre looks at the influence that this theater had on Curel.