Author: Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de
Biography:
FLORIAN, Jean-Pierre Claris de (1755-94: ESTC)
Florian was born at Sauve in the south of France, in an aristocratic family with military traditions. Modern sources are evasive about his father but the translator of Ruth, Samuel Maxey (q.v.), claims that his name was Charles de Florian and that he was an officer obliged by plotting enemies to retire from the army. (His account is little more than a translation of the preface to a French edition of Florian's fables published in Paris in 1802. The French editor maintains that Charles himself was a schemer.) Sources agree that he then married a Spanish woman, Gilette de Salgues (1730-57). After her death their son lived at the Château de Florian under the guardianship of his uncle Philippe-Antoine, the marquis de Florian, who was married to a niece of Voltaire. Introduced to the boy in 1765, Voltaire became an important influence. In 1768 he entered the household of the duc de Penthièvre at Anet near Paris; the nobleman became a lifelong patron. Florian went to a military academy and took a commission in Penthièvre's company of dragoons but soon gave up his military career to live with the family on their estate at Anet and at their town house in Paris. He was a precocious and ambitious writer. Starting with comedies and satires (notably an abolitionist poem, Voltaire et le serf du Mont-Jura, 1782), he went on to write short stories (contes) and novels. Already received into the Academies of Madrid and Florence, he was finally elected to the Académie française in 1788. During the Revolution he took refuge at his patron's property at Sceaux. But he had dedicated a novel to the Queen in 1786 and on that charge he was arrested and imprisoned on 15 Jul. 1794. Following the sudden death of Robespierre, however, his friends secured his release on 27 Jul. He died in Paris on 13 Sept., apparently of tuberculosis, and is buried, with a monument, at Sceaux, despite its having been confiscated on the death of Penthièvre in 1793. Florian's best poetic work, his Fables (1792), was translated into English in 1806 but in a prose version; the first separate collection in verse appeared in 1837. (Maxey, "Life" in Florian, Ruth [1805]; Wikipédia 24 Sept. 2021; Encyclopedia Britannica [1911] 10: 539-40) HJ
Other Names:
- Claris de Florian
- Florian