Romain Rolland

Romain Rolland was born in 1866 at Clamecy, in the Nièvre, into a family of prosperous townspeople and farmers. He entered the École normale supérieure in 1886, took a degree in history and spent two formative years in Rome, where he befriended Malwida von Meysenbug, who had known Nietzsche and Wagner. A doctoral thesis on the origins of opera led to a career as a music historian, crowned in 1903 by the first chair of music history at the Sorbonne.

Rolland campaigned for a people’s theatre and wrote dramas of the French Revolution, among them Danton (1900), but his larger ambitions lay in biography and the novel. Beethoven (1903) opened a series of lives of heroic creative spirits, and Jean-Christophe (1904–12), ten volumes following a German composer of genius and his friendship with a young Frenchman, offered a vision of reconciliation between the two nations. Colas Breugnon (1919), a high-spirited tale of a Burgundian craftsman, honoured the stock from which he came.

When war broke out in 1914, Rolland, then in Switzerland, published the articles later collected as Above the Battle (1915), appealing to intellectuals on both sides to resist hatred; vilified in France, he received the 1915 Nobel Prize. He later turned to Indian thought, writing on Gandhi and corresponding with Tagore and Freud, while his sympathy for the Soviet Union, including a meeting with Stalin in 1935, remains contested. He spent his last years in Vézelay and died there in December 1944.