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Jean Giono (30 March 1895 – 8 October 1970) was a French writer who wrote works of fiction mostly set in the Provence region of France.
Colline was followed by two more novels heavily influenced by Virgil and Homer, Un de Baumugnes (1929) and Regain (1930), the three together comprising the famous “Pan trilogy”, so-called because in it Giono depicts the natural world as being imbued with the power of the Greek god Pan. The other novels Giono published during the nineteen-thirties on the whole continued in the same vein—set in Provence, with peasants as protagonists, and displaying a pantheism view of nature. Marcel Pagnol based three of his films on Giono's work of this period: Regain, starring Fernandel and with music by Honegger; Angèle, and La Femme du boulanger, with the actor Raimu.
Throughout the nineteen-thirties, Giono expressed the pacifism he had adopted as a result of his experiences during World War I in novels such as Le grand troupeau (1931), and pamphlets such as Refus d’obéissance (1937), and the Lettre aux paysans sur la pauvreté et la paix (1938). This in turn resulted in his forming a relationship with a group of like-minded people including Lucien Jacques and Henri Fluchère among others, who gathered each year in the hamlet of Contadour, and whose pacifist writings were published as the Cahiers du Contadour. Bibliographie des ouvrages de Jean GIONO (in French)
In 1937, he famously asked, "What is the worst that can happen if Germany invades France?"
The subsequent period of renewal saw the self-educated Giono now turn to Stendhal as a literary model in the same way as previously he had been influenced by the Classics. His novels thus began to be set in a specific time and place, confronting the protagonists with specific politics, issues, causes and events, in contrast with the timelessness of his earlier work. He also adopted the Stendhalian narrative technique of letting the reader into the experience of the protagonist by means of the interior monologue, whereas the dominant technique of his earlier novels had been that of the omniscient narrator.
He similarly formed the ambition of writing a sequence of ten novels inspired by Balzac’s Comédie humaine, in which he would depict characters from all strata of society rather than peasants, and compare and contrast different moments in history by depicting the experiences of members of the same family in times a hundred years apart. This project was never realised, with only the four Hussard novels, ( Angelo (1958), Le Hussard sur le Toit (1951), Le Bonheur fou (1957), Mort d’un personnage (1948)) actually completed according to plan, but it is echoed in Giono's postwar work in the dichotomy between historical novels set in the mid-nineteenth century, and contemporary novels set in the mid-twentieth.Giono, Jean. Oeuvres romanesques complètes. 6 vols. Edition de la Pléiade établie par Robert Ricatte. Paris: Gallimard, 1971-1983 Postface à Angelo. IV 1163-1182 His newfound interest in history even led to his writing an actual history book, Le Désastre de Pavie (1963).
As he began to focus on the human being rather than the natural world, his understanding of psychology and motivation was also influenced by the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose analysis helped him to articulate a much darker view of human nature in his later years, and about whom he wrote the article " Monsieur Machiavel, ou le coeur humain dévoilé" (1951).
In 1944, when France was liberated, Giono was again accused of collaboration with the Nazis, and was again imprisoned for five months before he was freed without charges ever being made. This led to his being blacklisted, so that for three years he was barred from publication. It was during this period of ostracism that he began in 1945 to write Angelo, metaphorically the laboratory in which he experimented, tested and attempted to integrate his new approach to his work. It contains not only a first version of the story of Angelo Pardi that took its final form in Le Hussard sur le toit and Le Bonheur fou, but also the nucleus of many other works of his second period, and makes use of new narrative techniques he developed further in other novels. He ultimately set it aside, no doubt considering it too derivative, and moved on to the other projects it gave rise to.
The most famous novel of his second period is Le Hussard sur le toit, the first part of the definitive version of the story of Angelo Pardi he had sketched in Angelo. It was published in 1951, and made into a film by Jean-Paul Rappeneau starring Juliette Binoche in 1995. Angélo, like Stendhal's Fabrice del Dongo (La Chartreuse de Parme) on whom he is modeled, is a chivalrous romantic whose quest constitutes an inquiry into the nature of happiness, while the cholera epidemic he finds himself confronted with in Provence in 1832 is an allegory for the wars that had so deeply affected Giono. In structure it is a picaresque series of episodes, full of evocative descriptions of the country. Its sequel, Le Bonheur fou (The Straw Man) (1957) follows Angélo in the Italy of the 1848 revolution.
Les Ames fortes (1950), filmed by Raoul Ruiz in 2001, is another of the masterpieces of this period. As dark as Un Roi sans divertissement, it examines the depths a person can sink to in greed, grasping self-interest and the exploitation of others. Also as in Un Roi sans divertissement, the story is again told purely in the words of the protagonists, without the intervention of a narrator or comment from the author, thus forcing readers to reach their own conclusions. Les Grands chemins (1951), considerably less dark, deals with the nature of the road, gambling, the lie, and friendship, again in a first-person narration entirely in the voice of the protagonist and devoid of explanation or elucidation from the author.
Also worthy of mention is his Voyage en Italie (1953). Neither a travel guide nor a straightforward account of a trip as the name suggests, this is a highly personal account of Giono's experiences and of the people he meets and sees that tells the reader more about Giono than about Italy.
Outside France, Giono's best-known work is probably the short story The Man who Planted Trees (and 1987 film version). This optimistic tale of a man who brings a deserted valley back to life by planting trees reflects Giono's long-standing love of the natural world, an attitude that made him a precursor to the modern ecologist. He thus declined to receive any royalties from this text, and granted free use to anyone who wanted to distribute or translate it. The French forestry authority (ONF) initiated a project named "Giono" in 2013. A small plot of beech trees of more southerly genetics was planted as an assisted migration experiment for climate change adaptation on the former World War I battlefield in Verdun. As of 2024, the beech saplings are growing well.
In his later years, Giono was honoured with the Prince Rainier of Monaco literary prize in 1953, awarded for his lifetime achievements, was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954, and became a member of the Conseil Littéraire of Monaco in 1963.
Giono died of a heart attack in 1970.
The Collège Jean Giono in Nice is named after him, as are streets in Cannes and Fréjus.
Second period
The first major novel of his second period to be published was Un roi sans divertissement (published in 1947, and made into a successful film for which Giono himself wrote the screenplay, in 1963). It takes the form of a detective story set in Haute Provence in the early nineteenth century, and reveals Giono's new pessimism about human nature in that the policeman is forced to the realisation that he himself is capable of being as evil as the murderer he is tracking. Stylistically brilliant, it consists of the juxtaposed accounts of events as told by the different people affected, devoid of explanation, from which the reader must piece together the meaning.
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Categories: 1895 Births, 1970 Deaths, People From Manosque, French People Of Italian Descent, French Pacifists, 20th-century French Novelists, Writers From Provence-alpes-côte D'azur, French Military Personnel Of World War I, French Male Novelists, French Male Short Story Writers, 20th-century French Short Story Writers, 20th-century French Male Writers
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