BAZIN, RENÉ. – French novelist, born in Angers on 26 December 1853, died in Paris on 20 July 1932. Noble is the effort to encompass in his work all the social, religious, and patriotic concerns of the age: his political and social ideas are bound to the strict Catholic doctrine of an enlightened believer, and his entire work as a narrator is sustained by a serene and active faith; in a single love he unites Catholic France and the Roman Church. Conservative in politics, he sympathizes with the ancien régime, yet he wishes to take an active part in the movement of contemporary social life in order to lead it back to the principles of former times. At times he may perhaps have exaggerated, but his good faith is evident.
His narrative work, at first more spontaneous and rich in inventiveness (Stéphanette, Ma tante Giron, Une tache d'encre, La sarcelle bleu, etc.), achieved full success with La terre qui meurt (1899), in which the danger of the depopulation of the countryside is denounced. With L’Isolée (1905), he began to acquire greater descriptive richness at the expense of invention: Le blé qui lève (1907) came, albeit unintentionally, to correct the sadness of the novel of the Vendée marshes. One may also recall Les Oberlé (1901), with its strong patriotic accent; Donatienne (1903), one of his finest works; the Mémoires d'une vieille fille (1908), La barrière (1901), Les nouveaux Oberlé (1919), etc., as well as the Contes de bonne Perrette (1904), the Récits de la plaine et de la montagne (1903), the Pages religieuses (1906), and Aujourd'hui et demain (1916).
B. always demonstrates a notable faculty of observation; he knows how to grasp the characteristic features of things and people and to reveal, in an atmosphere of poetry, the bonds that bind man to his land: a sincere optimist, he exalts, in a pleasant, rich, and effortless language, the beauty of Christian virtue and the necessity of moral and social laws.