BOURGET, PAUL. - French poet, novelist and critic, born in Amiens on 2 September 1852, died in Paris on 25 December 1935. A member of the Académie Française from 1894. A student of the most complex psychological and sociological problems of his time, to which he applied himself with an upright and firm Catholic conscience, B. appeared as the most generous and worthy champion opposing both Zolaesque naturalism and the determinism of Taine. A brilliant continuer of Stendhal's analytical method in the field of narrative literature, he spread the taste for an investigation of the "self" and of the relations that govern life among men, minute, exceedingly acute, for which he was reproached in certain pages for an abstract dryness and an excessive tension of feeling. B. remains, in any case, a master of the modern novel, even if his distinguished qualities as a critic and as a convinced and effective moralist are not matched in him by equally marked gifts of imagination and creative power. His characteristic trait and his principal merit consist in having sought to organize around the cornerstones of Christian morality the demands of the contemporary soul, showing with delicate, profound and persuasive art the inseparability of the interests and aims of both.
His characters belong by preference to the classes of the well-to-do bourgeoisie and of the aristocracy, in which B. found - or so it seemed to him - the spiritual unease more widespread, and represented in many facets, whose causes were the object of his passionate investigations.
He made his debut in the field of lyric poetry, with the collections of verse published in his early youth, Au bord de la mer (1872), La vie inquiète (1875), Edel (1878), Les aveux (1882), in which he stands out more for exquisite stylistic gifts than for genius of individual inspiration, echoing the examples of the literary generation dominated by Lamartine, Stendhal and Baudelaire. Later, turning decisively toward what were to remain throughout his life his principal intellectual interests, he published the highly valuable Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883, definitive edition 1901), followed by the Pages de critique et de doctrine (1912) and the Nouvelles pages de critique et de doctrine (1922). Meanwhile he was disseminating the spiritualist conclusions at which he had arrived, in a copious and successful series of novels, among which the very well known Le disciple (1889), from whose lucid pages the danger that philosophical positivism presents when it intervenes in the moral and logical formation of the young is vigorously denounced; Un divorce (1904), which confronts and upholds with warm eloquence the theme of the indissolubility of marriage; Le démon de midi (1914) and Le sens de la mort (1915), where the necessity of a profound restoration of the moral and religious conscience acquires new force of persuasion from the measure of an art ever more vigilant and aware of its lofty purposes.
In L'étape (1903) B., a supporter of the monarchical tradition, pointed out the dangers of democracy; in the drama La barricade (1910) he showed the social theories of Georges Sorel in action.
A friend of Italy, to which he offered numerous testimonies of his admiration and of his spiritual attachment, B. is also the author of a book of observations and recollections, Sensations d'Italie (1891), which is to be counted among his best writings for sincerity of inspiration and felicity of investigation. Particularly noteworthy are the moral and philosophical reflections inspired in him by a stay, in the preceding year, in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto. The volume entitled Outre-mer, notes sur l'Amérique (1895) should also be mentioned.
The collection of his Oeuvres complètes was published in Paris (1910 and later).