Jules Champfleury
Jules Champfleury, born Jules-François-Félix Husson on September 17, 1821, in Laon, France, was a notable French writer and art critic who emerged from a middle-class background. Feeling constrained by his bourgeois upbringing, he moved to Paris at seventeen, where he became immersed in the bohemian arts scene. Champfleury began his literary career writing for various periodicals, where he crafted portraits of eccentric figures within the bohemian fringe. His early works, published in 1847, displayed a fantastical style that reflected his fascination with the unconventional.
Throughout his career, Champfleury collaborated with prominent literary figures like Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, ultimately influencing his shift towards realism in art and literature. He founded the journal "Réalisme" and contributed to the discourse on the relationship between art and politics, particularly after experiencing the upheaval of the Paris Commune. His novels, such as "Les Bourgeois de Molinchart," are recognized for their exploration of themes like adultery, foreshadowing later works by authors like Flaubert. In his later years, he focused on scholarly writing, producing significant texts on the history of caricature. Champfleury passed away in 1889, leaving behind a legacy as a critical voice in the evolution of 19th-century French literature.
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Jules Champfleury
Author
- Born: September 17, 1821
- Birthplace: Laon, France
- Died: December 6, 1889
- Place of death: Sèvres, France
Biography
Jules Champfleury was born Jules-François-Félix Husson on September 17, 1821, in Laon, France, to a middle-class family. His father, a civil servant, and his mother, a grocer, represented a bourgeois lifestyle that Jules found stifling, so he left at the age of seventeen to Paris, where he fell in with a bohemian crowd that nurtured his first interest in the arts. He returned to Laon in 1840 to attend the College de Laon until 1843, and he began writing for the Journal de l’Aisne, a newspaper acquired by his father in 1840. The Hussons had adopted the name Fleury for their journalistic endeavors, and because there was already another writer named Jules Fleury, Jules took the name Champfleury, under which he began writing columns and features for L’Artiste, Corsaire-Satan, Tam-Tam, Pamphlet, and other periodicals that chronicled the bohemian scene. Champfleury specialized in portraits of eccentrics of a strange and fantastic cast who epitomized the bohemian fringe; he collected much of this writing into the volumes Chien-Calliou, fantaisie d’hiver, Feu Miette, fantaisie d’ete and Pauvre Trompette, fantaisies de printemps, all published in 1847.
Champfleury’s work brought him into contact with other writers of the same magazines, including Theophile Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, and Honore de Balzac (a major influence on his writing). He also wrote art criticism and in 1848 teamed with Charles Baudelaire to found the newspaper Le Salut Public. That same year, strongly affected by the Paris Commune uprisings, Champfleury began promulgating a more conservative viewpoint, calling for a separation of politics and art and downplaying the relationship between bohemian art and realism. Under the influence of the painter Gustave Courbet, Champfleury became a promoter of realism in the arts, and founded the journal Realisme, which he published between 1856 and 1857. For the next decade he wrote both criticism and fiction, including the novels Les Bourgeois de Molinchart (1855), whose handling of the theme of adultery is seen as a precursor to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), and La Succession Le Camus (1858), a satire of bourgeois life. Champfleury also published short fiction, much of it concerned with artist protagonists, and collected in Les Bons Contes font les bon amis (1863) and other volumes. His sole fantasy, Les bras de la Venus de Milo (1874), is a fable concerning a professor whose obsession with the sculpture of the Venus de Milo results in a fantastic resolution.
Champfleury devoted much of the last twenty years of his life to scholarly writing, including Histoire de la caricature antique and Histoire de la caricature moderne, both published in 1865. Champleury’s wife, whom he had married 1867 and had a son and daughter by, died in 1874. He was also predeceased by his daughter. He spent the years before his death in 1889 as head of the administration of the national porcelain factory at Sevres.