Georges Courteline

Writer

• Born: June 25, 1858
• Birthplace: Tours, France
• Died: June 25, 1929

Biography

In current parlance, Georges Courteline could be called an operator. By 1894, six of his plays had been produced in Paris, and he had produced novels in which he commented scathingly on the incompetence of the bureaucrats who ran most of Paris’s ministries and held their positions for life. He wrote with inside knowledge from his post in the Ministry of Church Affairs. Courteline also wrote biting satirical columns about the ministries. His superiors, fearful of his pen, eagerly granted him sick leave when he requested it in 1894, fearing that if they did not, he would accuse them of vindictiveness. From 1894 until 1929, the year of his death, Courteline continued to receive his monthly stipend without ever going back to work at the ministry.

In 1897, his play, Monsieur Badin, was staged in Paris at the Grand-Guignol. The play’s protagonist, like Courteline himself, cannot face the thought of going to his job because it bores him, but he appears dutifully each day because he fears losing his job if he does not. He solves his problem by demanding a pay raise from his superiors. They are so astounded by the unmitigated brassiness of his request that they stand back and admire Monsieur Badin.

In much of his other work, Courteline took vicious swipes at government bureaucracies that are rampant with incompetence and corruption. He attacked the tangles of bureaucratic rules and regulations that are, by their very complexity, unenforceable.

Courteline was the pseudonym of Georges Victor Marcel Moinaux, who was born in 1858 in Tours, France, where today a street bears his name. His parents moved to Paris when he was just past his infancy. When he turned thirteen, he began his studies at the Collège de Meaux, graduating in 1876. He immediately entered military service and, when that obligation was fulfilled, returned to Paris to the very secure position he held with the Ministry of Church Affairs. Always interested in literature, he dabbled in writing poetry and founded a poetry journal, Paris- Moderne, that did not survive for long but made an impact on Paris’s literary scene.

Moinaux adopted the penname Georges Courteline when he began writing plays in the 1890’s, and he continued to produce plays and novels until 1906. In 1899, the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor and in 1926, he was elected to the Académie Goncourt. The tone of his writing was always incisively satirical, and it was this very tone that assured his future. Besides satirizing bloated bureaucracies and the bureaucrats who run them, Courteline cast his jaundiced eye on Paris’s moneyed aristocrats, writing sharp criticisms of them.

André Antoine involved Courteline in his budding experimental Théâtre-Libre in 1890 and staged several of his dramas, including some in which Courteline acted. Twice married to actresses, Courteline lost his first wife, Suzanne Berty, to tuberculosis in 1902. His second wife, Marie- Jeanne Brécourt, managed his financial affairs so deftly that Courteline was able to stop writing plays in 1906 and spend much of his time traveling while receiving his royalties and pension.