782 FERDINAND BRUNETIERE. 



FERDINAND BRUNETIERE. 



(1849-1900.) 



Foreign Honorary Member in Class III, Section 4, 1890. 



Ferdinand Brunetiere was born at Toulon, on the 19th of July, 

 1849. His father, a naval officer, came from the region still best 

 remembered as La Vendee, about whose name lingers a romantic 

 savor of loyalty to tradition. As a boy Brunetiere seems to have 

 had no fixed home, but an unusual experience of France, ranging 

 from Provence to Britanny. He studied at the Lycee of Marseilles, 

 and finally at the Lycee Louis Le Grand in Paris, where among his 

 fellow-students was Paul Bourget. In 1869 he was examined for 

 admission to the Ecole Normale, and was rejected — an ironic incident 

 in the life of a man destined to be the most eminent French critic 

 of literature during the next thirty years. 



In 1870 he served as a soldier in the defense of Paris. The subse- 

 quent excesses of the Commune probably intensified his temperamental 

 distrust of revolution as distinguished from evolution. The next 

 four or five years he passed obscurely, reading and studying with 

 characteristic intensity and precision, but supporting himself by 

 teaching at secondary schools. Among his fellow-teachers he again 

 met Paul Bourget, to whose thenceforth close friendship he owed the 

 chance which fixed the outlines of his career. 



In 1875, the director of the Revue des Deux Mondes asked Bourget 

 to write an article which required more conservative affection for 

 literary tradition than Bourget then cherished. He therefore called 

 the attention of the director to his friend Brunetiere, whose opinions 

 happened to coincide with those desired. This almost accidental 

 introduction to the Revue des Deux Mondes not only brought to 

 public notice the remarkable individuality of Brunetiere, but began 

 the relation between the man and the review destined to last and 

 strengthen steadily. For years before he died, people thought of 

 them together — almost as one. Though Brunetiere in time found 

 many other vehicles of expression, his numberless writings for the 

 Revue des Deux Mondes were the basis of all the rest. Yet his 



