Paul Féval
| Paul Henri Corentin Féval | |
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1862 lithographic caricature of Paul Féval by Étienne Carjat.
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| Born |
29 September 1816 Rennes, France1 |
| Died | 8 March 1887 (aged 70) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Novelist, Dramatist |
| Genre | Historical novel |
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Paul Henri Corentin Féval, père (29 September 1816 - 8 March 1887) was a French novelist and dramatist.
He was the author of popular swashbuckler novels such as Le Loup Blanc (1843) and the perennial best-seller Le Bossu (1857). He also penned the seminal vampire fiction novels Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1860), La Vampire (1865) and La Ville Vampire (1874) and wrote several celebrated novels about his native Brittany and Mont Saint-Michel such as La Fée des Grèves (1850).
Féval's greatest claim to fame, however, is as one of the fathers of modern crime fiction. Because of its themes and characters, his novel Jean Diable (1862) can claim to be the world's first modern novel of detective fiction. His masterpiece was Les Habits Noirs (1863–1875), a criminal saga comprising eleven novels.
After losing his fortune in a financial scandal, Féval became a born-again Christian, stopped writing crime thrillers, and began to write religious novels, leaving the tale of the Habits Noirs uncompleted.
Paul Henri Corentin Féval was born at the Hôtel de Blossac in Rennes in Brittany on 29 September 1816. A number of his novels deal with the history of his native province. He was educated for the bar and became a full-fledged lawyer in 1836. However, he soon moved to Paris, where he gained a footing by the publication of his novel Le Club des phoques (1841) in the Revue de Paris. It was soon followed by two more swashbucklers: Rollan Pied de Fer (1842), Les Chevaliers du Firmament and Le Loup Blanc (both 1843). The latter novel features a heroic albino who fights for justice in a Zorro-like disguise, one of the earliest treatments of a crimefighter with a secret identity.
Féval's break came with the Les Mystères de Londres (1844), a sprawling feuilleton written to cash in on the success of Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris. In it, Irishman Fergus O'Breane tries to avenge the wrongs of his countrymen by seeking the annihilation of England. The plot anticipates that of Alexandre Dumas, père's The Count of Monte Cristo by one year. The novel also features a Mafia-like criminal secret society called the Gentlemen of the Night, a theme that will become recurrent in Féval's oeuvre. Féval published the series under the pseudonym Sir Francis Trollop.
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