Georges Darien

Georges Darien (pseudonym for Georges Hippolyte Adrien), (6 April 1862 – 19 August 1921), was a French writer associated with anarchism and an outspoken advocate of Georgism.

Georges-Hippolyte Adrien was born at 46, Rue du Bac in Paris, to linen draper Honoré-Charles-Emile Adrien, born in 1822 in the Charente, and Françoise-Sidonie Adrien, née Chatel. His brother, Henri-Gaston Darien, was born two years later, in 1864. Henri-Gaston was later to become a peintre du genre specializing in interiors and scenes of Paris life. He exhibited in the Salons of 1896 and 1897, received the Légion d'honneur in 1910, and died in 1926.

Darien's mother died in 1869. His father remarried an Alsatian Protestant, Elise-Antoinette Schlumberger, born in 1839. Their daughter Jeanne was born in 1873 in Versailles and died in 1914. Strict religiosity of Darien's stepmother contrasted with the anti-clericalist views that he would come to adopt.

Following an undistinguished baccalaureate earned at the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris, in March 1881, Darien voluntarily enlisted in the army for five years. Between June 1883 and March 1886, he served in a disciplinary unit, the Battalions of Light Infantry of Africa, in the Tunisian desert. His service there included a total of nearly a year of confinement in Gafsa, the Tunisian prison camp.

In 1889 Darien published his first book, Bas les cœurs!, a satire of the impact of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the Paris Commune of 1871 on a French bourgeois family living in the provinces. It was followed in 1890 by Biribi, discipline militaire. As experienced personally by the author, the prison camp was not a mere penitentiary; it was the ultimate punishment that the French Army reserved for its insubordinates. The book inspired a campaign that succeeded, albeit only nominally, in the reform of prison camps. However, the Gafsa camp remained open until the 1920s, succumbing as a result of a campaign conducted by Albert Londres. The same year saw the publication of Les Chapons and Les vrais Sous-offs, followed in 1891 by Les Pharisiens, a fictional indictment of French antisemitism and its most prominent advocate, Édouard Drumont, and the only exception among the novels that Darien uniformly narrated in the first person.

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