Jean Giraudoux

Jean Giraudoux (born October 29, 1882, Bellac, France—died January 31, 1944, Paris) was a French novelist, essayist, and playwright who created an impressionistic form of drama by emphasizing dialogue and style rather than realism.

Giraudoux was educated at the École Normale Superiéure and made the diplomatic service his career. He became known as an avant-garde writer with a group of early poetic novels, such as Suzanne et le Pacifique (1921). Although those works were generally considered difficult, farfetched, and precious, other works soon appeared. In Siegfried et le Limousin (1922), Giraudoux depicts in silhouette, as it were, the hostility between two enemies, France and Germany, as a background to his story of a man who suffers from amnesia. Bella (1926) is a love story behind which can be glimpsed the rivalry between two statesmen, a nationalist and an internationalist. Thus, what was to become the central theme of Giraudoux’s plays was made clear: a pair of opposites, whatever they might be—man and God in Amphitryon 38 (1929), man and woman in Sodome et Gomorrhe (1943), or the world of paganism and the world of the Old Testament in Judith (1931).

Giraudoux’s theatrical career began in 1928 with Siegfried, a dramatization of his own novel, which introduced the actor and director Louis Jouvet, with whom Giraudoux was associated until World War II. It is notable that apart from Intermezzo (1933), in which a timid ghost revolutionizes a small provincial town until a romantic little schoolteacher restores order, Giraudoux never worked on an original subject: he sought inspiration in classical or biblical tradition as in Électre (1937) and Cantique des cantiques (1938; “Song of Songs”). He adapted Margaret Kennedy’s novel The Constant Nymph in Tessa, la nymphe au coeur fidèle (1934) and La Motte-Fouqué’s fairy tale of a water sprite who loves a mortal man as Ondine (1939).

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Among Giraudoux’s other important works combining tragedy, humour, and fantasy rendered in a style of exceptional virtuosity are La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935; adapted in English by Christopher Fry as Tiger at the Gates [1955] and The Trojan War Will Not Take Place [1983]), which argues that wars originate from small details interpreted as good or bad by those who are, supposedly, doing what is best, and La Folle de Chaillot (1946; adapted in English by Maurice Valency as The Madwoman of Chaillot [1947]), in which a tribunal of elderly eccentric Parisian ladies, assisted by a ragpicker, wipe out a world of speculators. He also wrote the scripts to two films: La Duchesse de Langeais (1942) and Les Anges du péché (1944).

In his plays Giraudoux tries to resolve the conflict between opposites by bringing them into contact. By this means he explores such fundamental dualities as war and peace, life and death, man and woman, and finally the meaning of human destiny. He treats these serious themes, however, not through the realistic depiction of psychological conflict but rather through a process of investigation, discussion, and reflection that is communicated to the audience through his characters’ recitatives and badinage. Giraudoux’s language is lyrical, poetic, and rich with metaphors, paradoxes, and allusions. The sense of humour so evident in his plays is marked by brilliant wit and a devastating sense of the absurd.

Giraudoux served in World War I and was awarded the Legion of Honour. From 1939 to 1940 he served as commissioner of information in the French government.