Paul Valery
Valéry was born of a Corsican father and Genoese mother in Sète, a town on the Mediterranean coast of the Hérault, but he was raised in Montpellier, a larger urban center close by. After a traditional Roman Catholic education, he studied law at university, then resided in Paris for most of the remainder of his life, where he was for a while part of the circle of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Valéry became a full-time writer late in life (at the age of fifty) when the man for whom he worked as private secretary, a former chief executive of the Agence Havas, Edouard Lebey, died of Parkinson’s disease in 1920. Until then, Valéry had first briefly earned his living at the Ministry of War before assuming the relatively flexible post as assistant to the increasingly impaired Lebey, a job he held for some twenty years.
After his election to the Académie française in 1925, Valéry became a tireless public speaker and intellectual figure in French society, touring Europe and giving lectures on cultural and social issues as well as assuming a number of official positions the admiring French nation eagerly offered him. He represented France on cultural matters at the League of Nations, serving on several of its committees. The Outlook for Intelligence (1989) contains English translations of a dozen essays resulting from these activities.
In 1931, he founded the Collège International de Cannes, a private institution teaching French language and civilization. The College is still operating today, offering professional courses for native speakers (for educational certification, law and business) as well as courses for foreign students.
He gave the keynote address at the 1932 German national celebration of the 100th anniversary of the death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This was a fitting choice, as Valéry shared Goethe’s fascination with science (specifically biology and the theory of light).
In addition to his activities as a member of the Académie française, he was also a member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, and of the Front national des Ecrivains. In 1937 he was appointed chief executive of what later became the University of Nice. He was the inaugural holder of the Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France.
During World War II, the Vichy regime stripped him of some of these jobs and distinctions because of his quiet refusal to collaborate with it and the German occupation, but Valéry continued throughout these troubled years to publish and to be active in French cultural life, especially as a member of the Académie française.
In 1900 he married Jeannie Gobillard, a friend of Mallarmé’s family, who was also a niece of the painter Berthe Morisot. The wedding was a double ceremony in which the bride’s cousin, Morisot’s daughter Julie Manet, married the painter Ernest Rouart.[1] Valéry and Gobillard had three children: Claude, Agathe, and François.
Valéry died in Paris in 1945. He is buried in the cemetery of his native Sète – the cemetery celebrated in his famous poem le Cimetière marin.
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