André Gide

André Gide was born in Paris in 1869, the only child of a law professor who died when the boy was eleven. Raised by his mother in an austere Protestant milieu, he was educated fitfully and early resolved to be a writer, moving in the Symbolist circle around Mallarmé. A journey to North Africa in the 1890s, and an encounter there with Oscar Wilde, opened him to the acceptance of his homosexuality — a discovery that would shape his work as decisively as his Protestant inheritance. In 1895 he married his cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux, a union that remained unconsummated and painful for both.

His books dramatise the collision between moral constraint and the claims of desire. Fruits of the Earth was a hymn to sensation; The Immoralist and Strait Is the Gate examined, from opposite sides, the costs of liberation and of renunciation; The Vatican Cellars, with its notorious ‘gratuitous act’, mocked every system of motive. The Counterfeiters, the only book he called a novel, folded the act of writing into its own structure. In 1908 he helped found the Nouvelle Revue Française, which became the central institution of French letters. Corydon defended homosexuality in public; his journals, kept across six decades, became a monument of self-scrutiny.

Gide’s candour extended to politics. Travels in the Congo exposed abuses by concessionary companies in French Equatorial Africa, and after a period of sympathy for communism, Return from the USSR (1936) recorded his disillusionment. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1947, he died in Paris in 1951; the following year the Catholic Church placed his works on its Index of Forbidden Books. His example of intellectual honesty weighed heavily on the generation of Sartre and Camus.