Jean Giono - Second Period

Second Period

The first major novel of his second period to be published was thus 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 her or himself must piece together the meaning.

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 Angélo 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 modelled, 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 the reader 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). 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 ecological movement. He thus declined to receive any royalties from this text, and granted free use to anyone who wanted to distribute or translate it.

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.