Edmond and Jules Goncourt

Edmond and Jules Goncourt were French brothers, writers, and constant collaborators who made significant contributions to the development of the naturalist novel and to the fields of social history and art criticism. Above all, they are remembered for their perceptive, revealing Journal and for Edmond’s legacy, the Académie Goncourt, which annually awards the Prix Goncourt to the author of an outstanding work of French literature.

The Goncourts’ widowed mother left them an income that enabled the brothers to live in modest comfort without working and rescued Edmond from a treasury clerkship that had driven him to suicidal despair. The brothers immediately began to lead a life doubly dominated by aesthetics and self-indulgence. Amateur artists, they first made a sketching tour of France, Algeria, and Switzerland. Back home in their Paris flat, they made a fetish of orderly housekeeping, but their lives were continually disordered by noises, upset stomachs, insomnia, and neurasthenia. Neither of them married. All the mistresses appearing in the Journal no doubt belonged to Jules, whose fatal stroke presumably was preceded by syphilis.

From attempts at art the brothers turned to plays and in 1851 published a novel, En 18, all without success. As journalists, they were arrested in 1852, though later acquitted, for an “outrage against public morality,” which consisted of quoting mildly erotic Renaissance verses in one of their articles. The brothers achieved more success with a series of social histories, which they began publishing in 1854. These drew on private correspondence, newspaper accounts, brochures, even dinner menus and dress patterns to recreate the life of specific periods in French history. As art critics, the Goncourts’ most notable achievement was L’Art du dix-huitième siècle (1859–75; French Eighteenth Century Painters), which helped redeem the reputations of such masters of that time as Antoine Watteau.

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The same meticulous documentation and attention to detail went into the Goncourts’ novels. The brothers covered a vast range of social environments in their novels: the world of journalism and literature in Charles Demailly (1860); that of medicine and the hospital in Soeur Philomène (1861); upper middle-class society in Renée Mauperin (1864); and the artistic world in Manette Salomon (1867). The Goncourts’ frank presentation of upper and lower social classes and their clinical dissection of social relations helped establish literary naturalism and paved the way for such novelists as Émile Zola and George Moore. The most lasting of their novels, Germinie Lacerteux (1864), was based on the double life of their ugly, seemingly impeccable servant, Rose, who stole their money to pay for nocturnal orgies and men’s attentions. It is one of the first realistic French novels of working-class life. Most of the other novels, however, suffer from overly long exposition and description, excessive detail, and mannered, artificial language. The Goncourts were also known for the theoretical prefaces to their novels; Edmond gathered a selection of these writings for the collection Préfaces et manifestes littéraires (1888; “Prefaces and Literary Manifestos”).

The Goncourts began keeping their monumental Journal in 1851, and Edmond continued it for 26 more years from Jules’s death in 1870 until his own. The diary weaves through every social stratum, from the hovels where the brothers sought atmosphere for Germinie Lacerteux to dinners with great men of the day. Full of critical judgments, scabrous anecdotes, descriptive sketches, literary gossip, and thumbnail portraits, the complete Journal is at once a revealing autobiography and a monumental history of social and literary life in 19th-century Paris.

The Académie Goncourt, first conceived by the brothers in 1867, was officially constituted in 1903.