Goncourt Brothers
From Philosopedia
Goncourt, Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de (26 May 1822 - 16 July 1896)
Goncourt, Jules Alfred Huot (17 December 1830 - 20 June 1870)
The Goncourt brothers, so closely associated in art and literature that everyone termed them les deux Goncourts, were art critics and historians of art, unsuccessful dramatists, promoters of Japanese art, and, in collaboration, authors of well-known novels of the naturalist school such as Soeur Philomène (1861) and Mme. Gervaisais (1869).
Their Journals des Goncourt (9 volumes, 1887 - 1896) described Parisian society over a period of forty years. They included collages of the tiniest minutiae, diary entries, song lyrics, notes, bills, scraps of paper.
In a collection of epigrams (Idées et sensations) the two Goncourts define religion as “part of a woman’s sex”; supernatural religion as “wine without grapes”; and life as “the unfruct of an aggregation of molecules.”
After Jules’s death Edmond provided for the founding of the Goncourt Academy (which was officially recognized in 1903). It awards the annual Goncourt Prize for fiction. They had inherited money from their father, who told them they must use it to start a literary academy - they did just that, and the Prix de Goncourt is the most prestigious literary prize in French literature.
According to J. M. Robertson, both were rationalists. Joseph McCabe calls both atheists. Historian Jonathan Dewald, referring to the two, quoted André Billy's The Goncourt Brothers (1960):
- Even the Goncourts, whose historical works sold badly, had considerable impact on their literary contemporaries. Their study of eighteenth-century society, wrote the often critical Edmond Scherer, was "one of the works that best allows us to understand the century . . . which at least best helps us enter into its intimate life." Their influence was especially strong on Emile Zola, who acknowledged that he had adapted their concept of the novel as an exploration of societal patterns. In 1896, only two years before he intervened in the Dreyfus Affair, Zola presented the principal eulogy at Edmond de Goncourt's funeral; despite Goncourt's anti-Semitism and his own concerns about anti-Semitic injustice, Zola described him as having a "noble gallantry of mind"; his "errors, if he were guilty of any, were errors arising only from his burning passion for literature."
Jules died relatively young of syphilis.
Edmond died in Champrosay and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris.
