FOURNIER, HENRI-ALAIN. - Born on 3 Oct. 1886 at Chapelle d'Angillon, died near Verdun on 22 Sept. 1914.

He is among the most evocative writers and storytellers of the early twentieth century for his "will" to believe, for his yearning to accept Catholicism as a soother of the torments of human "solitude." In F.'s post-Romantic memorialism, however, religious experience is often reduced to a sensory suggestion, of myth and not of concrete spiritual reality, of refined restlessness rather than of integral moral conquest. But even in this guise the religious sentiment inspires pages of intense ethical vibration: not only in his narrative masterpiece Le grand Meaulnes (1913), but also in the hurried confessions of the Correspondance avec Rivière (1926-29) and in the posthumous Miracles (1924).

Bibliography5 works

BIBL.: M. Maraschini, A. F., Milan 1942; A. Léonard, A. F. et Le grand Meaulnes, Paris 1944; A. Becker, Intérêts spirituel d'A. F., ibid. 1946; A. Sprout, Le rêve d'A. F., Charleroi 1946; E. Rideau, Comment lire A. F., Paris 1946.

Giacomo Petrucchi

@incollection{ec5_fournier_henri_alain, author = {Petrocchi, Giorgio}, title = {Fournier, henri-alain}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {V}, pages = {1559--1560}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1950}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/fournier-henri-alain} }

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Fournier, Henri-Alain

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