Jean Giono
‘‘The most colorful season is autumn when the oak’s leafs turn to yellow. But very soon, they become rust-colored and don’t change any more. The whole country is rusty.’’- Jean Giono
This poet allows us through his works to know profound Provence, first with Manosque his native village and then with description of valleys, plains and arid mountains that were depited among others in ‘Regain’.
Born in 1895 in Manosque, Jean Giono has very rarely left his native village. In 1911, he gave up his studies in order to work as a bank employee in Manosque. During word war one, Giono was mobilized and participated in battles, in particular the ones of Verdun, Chemin des Dames and of Montkemmel, where he discovered the horrors of the war: a shock that he kept all his life long. He evokes that painful experience in ‘Le Grand Troupeau’ and in some pacific essays in the thirties. During the years that followed the war, Giono writes without being tired. In 1929, the success of ‘Colline’ and ‘Un de Braumugnes’ urges him to stop his job in the bank. Marcel Pagnol produced the movie ‘Regain’; which was published the following years. Those three novels were be grouped together under one title: ‘Pan’. It was followed by ‘Le serpent d’étoile’, ‘Solitude de la pité’, ‘Le grand troupeau’, ‘Jean le Bleu’ (an autobiographical novel), ‘Le chant du monde’, ‘Que ma joie demeure’. Giono militated in favour of the peace, against the wars and the dictatorship. In the period between the two wars, he’s mobilized but arrested because of pacifism. After being released from prison, the sales of his books decreased. ‘Angelo’ which was written in 1945 open the cycle of the ‘hussard’ followed by ‘Mort d’un Personnage’ and ‘Le Hussard sur le toit’ that was completed in 1951. Until his death, Giono dedicated his life to writing and he realized some films. In the course of his last years, his work is reduced because of cardiac weakness. He died in the night of the 8th of October 1970.
