Charles-Louis Philippe - Life

Life

Son of a village clogmaker, Charles-Louis Philippe rose from his modest background first to Secondary education via a grant, then to the world of letters. But he remained attached to the class of his birth. He wrote to the bourgeois writer and politician Maurice Barrès: "My grandmother was a beggar, my father, who was a proud child, begged before he was old enough to work for his bread. I belong to a generation which has not yet passed through the world of books. (...) I must remind you that there are in me more imperative truths than those you call ‘French truths’. You separate nationalities, that’s how you differentiate the world, but I separate by class. (...) We have been walled up like the poor, and sometimes when Life came knocking, it was carrying a big stick. Our only resource was to love each other. That’s why my writing is always more tender than my head tells me to write. I think I am in France the first person from a race of the poor to enter the world of literature."

Philippe passed the Baccalaureat in science in 1891, but failed in his attempts to enter the specialist colleges in Paris (École polytechnique, École centrale). He eventually obtained a modest office job in the administration of Paris, which allowed him to settle in the capital and pursue his vocation as a writer. Among his literary friends and admirers would be Paul Claudel, Léon-Paul Fargue, André Gide, Jean Giraudoux, Francis Jammes, Valery Larbaud.