FOURNIER, HENRI-ALAIN. - B. on 3 Oct. 1886 at Chapelle d'Angillon, d. 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 pacifier of the torments of human “solitude.” In F.’s post-Romantic memorial writing, religious experience is, however, often reduced to a sensory suggestion, to myth rather than to concrete spiritual reality, to refined restlessness rather than to an integral moral attainment. Yet even in this form religious feeling inspires pages of intense ethical vibration: not only in his narrative masterpiece Le grand Meaulnes (1913), but also in the perceptive confessions of the Correspondance avec Rivière (1926-29) and in the posthumous Miracles (1924).