Charles Du Bos

Charles Du Bos was a French essayist and critic, known for works including Approximations (1922–37), a seven-volume collection of essays and letters, and for his Journal, an autobiographical work published posthumously from 1946 to 1961. His other work included Byron et le besoin de la fatalité (1929), a study of Lord Byron, and Dialogue avec André Gide (also 1929), an essay on his friend André Gide. Influenced by thinkers including Henri Bergson, Georg Simmel and Friedrich Nietzsche, Du Bos was well-known as a literary critic in France in the 1920s and 1930s. He maintained a distance from the political developments of those decades, while nonetheless seeking in his writing to reframe political phenomena as ethical problems. Alongside Gide and the American novelist Edith Wharton, he was involved in providing aid to Belgian refugees in Paris following the 1914 German invasion of Belgium. Raised Catholic, Du Bos lost his faith as a young man, then regained it in 1927, and regarded this conversion as the central event of his life.

Charles Du Bos was born in Paris on 27 October 1882. He belonged to a family of the haute bourgeoisie from the region around Amiens, with an English mother and American grandmother, and grew up speaking both French and English. He was schooled at the Catholic Collège Gerson, then attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly from 1895 and Balliol College, Oxford in 1901 and 1902. It was at Oxford that he initially lost his Catholic faith.

In 1902 he abandoned an agrégation in English at the Sorbonne, and travelled instead to Florence, where he became friends with Violet Paget. Du Bos then spent time in Berlin in 1904 and 1905, where he stayed with Reinhold and Sabine Lepsius and became friends with Max Liebermann, Ernst Robert Curtius and Bernard Groethuysen. In this period, he studied the history of art under Heinrich Wölfflin and came into contact with Georg Simmel. While in Germany Du Bos arrived at a set of beliefs about religion and its relation to art to which he would adhere for the following quarter of a century.

In February 1907 Du Bos married Juliette Siry, with whom he had one daughter. He suffered from chronic illness from 1913 and was at times forced to abandon his work as a result. In 1915 his brother was killed in battle.

Du Bos was close friends with André Gide. He admired Gide's work, shared his spiritual commitments, and described a dialogue with Gide "in the margins" of his own writing. His friendship with Gide later declined, and Du Bos' estimation of Gide's work diminished accordingly. Their conflict was rooted in Du Bos' perception of Gide as disavowing or betraying his spiritual faith, in contrast to Du Bos' own return to faith. Du Bos' essay Dialogue avec André Gide was published in 1929.

From 1914 to 1916 he and Gide were part of the Foyer Franco-Belge, in which capacity they worked to find employment, food and housing for Franco-Belgian refugees who arrived in Paris following the German invasion of Belgium. These efforts were led by Edith Wharton, who Du Bos had met through their mutual friend Paul Bourget. He was later asked to resign from his administrative role in the Foyer by Wharton and, when he declined, was relieved of his power to issue financial grants. In the years 1919–21 he was Paris correspondent for The Athenaeum.

Du Bos became well-known in France for his literary criticism in the 1920s and 1930s. From 1922 to 1927 he was a supervisor of foreign writers for the publisher Plon. From 1925 to 1932 he lectured at universities in Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

Du Bos converted to Roman Catholicism, the faith of his childhood, in 1927, having previously been a theist. He regarded his conversion as the central event of his life, and described it in his work over a number of years. In the late 1920s Du Bos became editor-in-chief of Vigile, a Catholic review founded by Jacques Maritain and staffed by Catholic former contributors to the Nouvelle Revue Française. In 1937 Du Bos travelled to the United States due to financial problems and his difficulty acquiring an academic post in France, and took up a position at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, with the support of Notre Dame's president John Francis O'Hara. Du Bos died in La Celle-Saint-Cloud on 5 August 1939.