Jean Tharaud

Jean Tharaud was a French writer.

Biography

Jean Tharaud, along with Jérôme Tharaud, his brother, were born at Saint-Junien in the Haute-Vienne, but spent their youth at Angoulême.
They left their native Limousin at the end of the 1890s to establish themselves in Paris. "Tied to Charles Péguy, whom they followed from the time of the Dreyfus Affair and the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, they soon placed themselves under the patronage of Maurice Barrès, and became his secretaries. The prix Goncourt they obtained in 1906 for Dingley, l'illustre écrivain, opened the doors of fame to them.
For fifty years, the two brothers wrote novels collaboratively, always signing their works with both their names.
After the First World War, the left the editor Émile-Paul for the great house of Plon-Nourrit who offered them exceptional conditions, including 20% royalties, and they became the house's flagship authors. Their great commercial successes in France made necessary the translation of their books in foreign languages throughout Europe and the United States.
On February 6, 1930, Jean Tharaud, while driving his car, accidentally capsized the writer Auguste Dorchain who was going down the rue Garancière. On the 12th of May of the following year, he was acquitted for that deadly accident.
Indefatigable travelers, they toured numerous countries, Palestine, Ottoman Syria, Iran, Morocco, Romania, Germany, Italy, Indochina, Ethiopia... and brought back from their voyages material for their journalism, novels or works claiming to be historical or sociological.
In 1935, Jean Tharaud became president of the Académie des Sciences Morales des Lettres et des Arts at Versailles.
The Tharaud brothers were both elected to the Académie Française. The election of Jérôme Tharaud before the war posed a question of conscience to the academicians: the writer, in fact, was only "half of a duo of authors" and one could not elect two people to the same seat. Jérôme having been elected alone in 1938, the Second World War and the Occupation delayed the election of Jean. After the Liberation, he was, with Ernest Seillière, René Grousset, Octave Aubry et Robert d'Harcourt, one of the five people elected on February 14, 1946 to the Académie française during the first election of that year, which aimed to fill the numerous places left vacant by the period of the Occupation. He was received on December 12, 1946 by Louis Madelin to the seat of Louis Bertrand.
The brothers' very dated work is marked by a spirit of conformism to the values of the time and notably by nationalism, racism, and antisemitism, particularly after the First [World War |Great War], through novelistic, historical, and journalistic writings et historique whose "indubitably antisemitic" message made them a great success in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Maurrasian Revue universelle. Léon Daudet praised the Tharauds as making themselves "the adepts of a theory of Jewish conspiracy which enlists them in the extreme right"; "From being subjects of astonishment or mockery, the Jews then became for our authors subjects of concern, a danger for the West."
The poet André Spire, who advised the brothers before their travel to Jerusalem, said that he had "sniffed out their latent antisemitism" and that he sensed that what attracted them to Jewish subjects was "neither the taste for justice, nor the hatred of the executioners, nor pity for the victims, but the cold curiosity of the reporter, of the traveler for the picturesque of the most atavistic, trampled Judaism, for the most excluded, corralled Judaism of the ghettoes."
Jean Tharaud is buried at the cimetière Saint-Louis in Versailles.
His wife, Hélène, born at Épernay on October 19, 1910, died at Versailles on April 12, 1989.

Works

;Works co-written with his brother Jérôme

Le Coltineur débile
La Lumière
Dingley, l'illustre écrivain
Les Hobereaux
L'Ami de l'ordre
Les Frères ennemis
Bar-Cochebas, Cahiers de la Quinzaine
Déroulède
La Maîtresse servante
La Tragédie de Ravaillac
La Mort de Déroulède
L’Ombre de la croix, Emile-Paul, 1917; grand succès réédité par Plon en 1920, Société du Livre d'art/Imprimerie Nationale en 1924, Grasset en 1929, Lapina et Mornay en 1931.L'Ombre de la croix.
Rabat, ou les heures marocaines
Une relève
Marrakech ou les seigneurs de l'Atlas
Un Royaume de Dieu, Revue des Deux Mondes puis Plon
Quand Israël est roi, Revue des Deux Mondes '' puis dédié à Maurice Barrès, chez Plon
La Fête arabe
L'invitation au voyage
La randonnée de Samba Diouf
La Maison des Mirabeau
Le Chemin de Damas
L'An prochain à Jérusalem !, Revue des Deux Mondes puis Plon
Rendez-vous espagnols
Un royaume de Dieu
Causerie sur Israël
Notre cher Péguy
La Semaine sainte à Séville
Petite Histoire des Juifs, Revue Universelle puis Plon
En Bretagne
Mes années chez Barrès
La Reine de Palmyre
La Chronique des frères ennemis
La Rose de Sâron
Fès ou les bourgeois de l'Islam
L'Empereur, le philosophe et l'évêque
L'Oiseau d'or
Paris-Saïgon dans l'azur
La Fin des Habsbourg
Quand Israël n'est plus roi,, Plon
La Jument errante, Éditions de France
Versailles
Vienne la rouge
Les Mille et un jours de l'Islam I : Les cavaliers d'Allah
Les Mille et un jours de l’Islam II : Les grains de la grenade
Le Passant d’Éthiopie
Cruelle Espagne
L'Envoyé de l'Archange
Les Mille et un jours de l’Islam III : Le rayon vert
Contes de Notre Dame, Plon
Le Miracle de Théophile, illustrations de Paul Charlemagne, éditions du Rocher, Monaco
Fumées de Paris et d'ailleurs
Vieille Perse et jeune Iran
Les Enfants perdus
Les Mille et un jours de l’Islam IV : La chaîne d'or
''La Double confidence''

English traductions

When Israël is king, translate by The Hon. Lady Whitehead, New York, Robert M. McBride Company, 1924 ; republication by Antelope Hill Publishing, 2024
Next Year in Jerusalem, New York, Boni & Liveright, 1925.
A Moroccan Trilogy: Marrakesh, Rabat and Fez, translate by Anthony Gladstone-Thompson, London, Eland Publishing, 320 p., 2021