about the playwright j u l e s
ro m a i n s
Jules Romains ranks among the most prolific French writers of the twentieth century and among the most important of the interwar period. His most famous work, the 27 volume novel Men of Good Will, is comparable to the works of Zola and Proust in scale and ambition. In Romains’ words, Men of Good Will “presented a sort of epic from the beginning of the 20th century all over the world, especially in France…it existed in my mind from my earliest youth, when I first began to write.” Romains was born Louis-Henri-Jean Farigoule on August 26, 1885 in the village of Saint-Julien Chapteuil. He spent most of his childhood in Paris, where his father was a teacher. Romains was an excellent student, earning a baccalauréat classique in 1900 and an additional baccalauréat in philosophy in 1902. In 1902, he also published his first poem, “Le Chef-d’ouvre” (“The Masterpiece”) in La Revue Jeune. He published under the pen name he would use the rest of his life—Jules Romains—so chosen because it was easy to pronounce, memorable, and expressed his “sympathie pour Rome” (love of Rome). Romains continued to write and publish poetry, but he also furthered his education, entering the elite Ecole Normale Supéricure in 1906 for an additional degree. After graduation, he taught philosophy full-time while continuing to write poems and prose. He published his first volume of poems, La Vie Unanime, in 1908. They outlined his new philosophy of Unanimism, which Romains said he discovered while wandering the streets of Paris. In Unanimism, Romains “had an intuition of the interconnectedness of all people, that groups possess a sort of collective soul, generated by disparate individuals who make up the group,” according to biographer Susan McCready. Unanimism influenced a generation of avant-garde thinkers and artists, particularly the utopian Group de l’Abbaye, whose members included Romains, socialist writer Alexandre Mercereau, and poet and playwright Charles Vildrac. Unanimism also inspired the paintings of the early Cubists, who challenged conventional divisions of space and time. “For
Above: Jules Romains in 1945, photo Eric Schaal/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Romains the city was an Unanimist entity, a psychological as well as a physical fact, where responses to the past and present interpenetrate,” explains the MOMA’s guide to Cubism. The precepts of Unanimism also inspired Romains’ own work as a playwright. He was particularly fascinated by conflicts between the collective and the individual. In his first play, the verse drama L’Armée dans la ville, a town temporarily resists invasion through collective effort. Produced at the Théatre de l’Odéon in 1911, L’Armée received critical praise but was a box office failure. It would be ten years before Romains would attempt playwriting again. In 1920, the influential director Jacques Copeau produced Romains’ Cromedyre-le-viel to acclaim, and Romains began playwriting in earnest. His first box office hit came in March 1923 with Monsieur Le Trouhadec saisi par la débauche, about a naïve yet cunning professor who falls in love with an actress in Monte Carlo. It was directed by visionary actor/ director/designer Louis Jouvet. The year 1923 held more triumph in store. Romains surpassed the success of Trouhadec with another comedy produced later year, Knock, ou Le Triomphe de la médicine (Dr. Knock, or the Triumph of Medicine). Jouvet, who directed and starred in Knock, did not expect this dark comedy of a maniacal doctor to be a hit, but he was wrong. The play was a