The Chronicle that Launched the Goncourt Brothers to Fame

A venomous chronicle of their life and times secured the Goncourts a place in history.

The names Edmond and Jules de Goncourt will be familiar to any fan of French arts and letters. The brothers were the co-authors of 22 volumes of diaries, considered go-to resources for 19th-century French literary life, and the founders of the Prix Goncourt, which has been awarded since 1903. The siblings were self-indulgent pleasure seekers, living comfortably off an early inheritance. Theirs was a world of highbrow dinner parties and prominent literary salons. Together they dabbled in history, art criticism and drama.

Behaving more like twins than brothers born eight years apart, Edmond and Jules composed aloud and wrote as one. Like a super-couple with a witty portmanteau, they called themselves ‘Juledmond’. Their vaunted first novel, En 18, was published on December 2, 1851, the day of Napoleon III’s coup d’état, which rather overshadowed their literary debut. Interest in their novel fizzled out and the brothers failed to receive the acclaim they craved to rid them of their amateur status. From that date, they kept a diary, its pages permeated with anxiety, thwarted ambition and injustice. Le Figaro called it a “masterpiece of conceit”, while André Gide confided it was impossible to read a page “where the good opinion they have of themselves does not burst out from between the lines”. Yet found within the Journals des Goncourt is an accurate description of French history. Meticulous notes, sometimes jotted on Edmond’s starched cuffs, chronicled both the frivolities of Paris and a Paris under siege. Slums and palaces, brothels and salons are described in these pages.

The Brothers Goncourt developed into venomous gossips, and heckled the successes of their so-called friends. Dinner guests stayed until the wee small hours to avoid being the first one gossiped about. ‘Fat little Zola’ was a frequent target. The abundance of famous names renders even their most common-place entries compelling. Readers are offered thumbnail sketches of Flaubert and Degas and horribly libellous entries about Victor Hugo, Stéphane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde and Dumas père et fils.

A place in history

Altruism didn’t enter into the brothers’ notion of a literary endowment. Originally conceived in 1867, it was simply a bid to guarantee the Goncourt name a place in the pantheon of French arts and letters. It worked. The Prix Goncourt is the most prestigious literary prize bestowed in France. Awarded annually since 1903 to the ‘best and most imaginative prose work’, recipients have included Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras and Michel Houellebecq. When Jules died in 1870, Edmond tried to relinquish their daily chronicle but, finding he was hooked, he contributed daily, until two weeks before his death.

Le Figaro published the journals in serialised form from 1886 to 1896. Edmond bequeathed his entire estate to the foundation of the Académie Goncourt. And despite the malevolence on each page, the Goncourt brothers created a powerful record in their quest for literary immortality.

From France Today Magazine