Jouve, Pierre Jean (1887-1976)

French writer born in Arras and died in Paris. Begun in the wake of the unanimist movement theorised by Jules Romains – for whom creative literature should capture the feelings and emotions of the collective – his career changed tack over the course of the 1920s, following his discovery of the works of Freud first of all, and then his conversion to Catholicism. There were thus published poetry collections such as Noces (1931) and Sueurs de sang (1933) in which mystical interrogations rubbed shoulders with investigations of the unconscious and where, the moving fruit of ‘the stain of incarnation’, the forces of Good and Evil clash. His novels, of which the best known is Paulina 1880 (1925), bear witness to a similar angst and in a haughty language tap into reflections on Sin, Love and Death. He is also the author of essays on art and music and, during the Second World War, he was a figure who resisted Nazism.