About

While many famous writers – Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde – are buried at Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, “there are also writers, many more of them in fact, buried there who have been completely forgotten, not necessarily because they were not good but because cultural memory is necessarily limited.”

In this talk Theodore Dalrymple discusses some forgotten writers of Père Lachaise, exploring their literary merit and the amusing byways of history, aiming ‘to entertain while illustrating the inexhaustible depth of our past’.

Here are some of the characters:

Eugene-Melchior de Vogue was a prisoner of war for 6 months after the Franco-Prussian war. After his release, he wrote a travel book about Syria and Lebanon, published in 1872, which suggests that not much has changed. Then he went as a diplomat to Russia, where he learned Russian and studied the Russian novel, introducing it to France. He returned to France, became a deputy in the parliament, hated it and wrote a scathing novel about it.

Jean-Richard Bloch was a prolific Alsatian Jewish novelist, playwright and essayist, who witnessed anti-semitic riots during the Dreyfus affair and described them in his work. A socialist who became a communist, he visited the Soviet Union and varnished the truth about it. he wrote an anti-capitalist novel that was translated into English. He spent the war years in Moscow, and returned to found and edit a daily paper with the poet Louis Aragon.

Emile Souvestre was a Breton novelist who also wrote a dystopian novel about the year 3000 (published in the 1840s). He wrote many novels, dying at an early age. His complete works run to 58 volumes.

Alice-René Brouillhet was a novelist whose doctor husband died in the First World War, and wrote a book commemorating the 1600 French doctors killed in the war, including one who served on the French mission to eradicate the typhus epidemic in Serbia which had killed a half of all the doctors in the country.

Francois-Vincent Raspail (after whom the Boulevard Raspail in Paris was named) was a scientist who invented histochemistry. He was a toxicologist who appeared in cases involving arsenic and was a revolutionary who spent several years in prison under different regimes. He invented a system of medicine based on camphor, and was exiled to Belgium where he collected Rubens and Breughel, and died a rich man, though he had absolutely no interest in money.

Charles Loudon was a Scottish doctor who practised in leamington Spa, retired to Paris where he died, but not before published a book (in French) trying to refute Malthus, suggesting that birth should be controlled by women breastfeeding for three years. His wife was an unsuccessful Irish novelist, the protagonist of one of whose novels was a swindler and impostor - called Colonel Trump.

Theodore Dalrymple is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is a retired physician who, most recently, practiced in a British inner-city hospital and prison. Dalrymple has written a column for The Spectator (London) for many years and writes regularly for National Review. Denis Dutton, editor of Arts & Letters Daily, called Dalrymple the “Orwell of our time.”

A Q&A Session will follow.