Ferdinand Brunetière

French writer and critic.

Brunetiere critical ability, wide learning and trenchant style won early recognition and he became editor-in-chief of the "Revue des Deux Mondes." For several years he held the position of professor of French literature and language at the Ecole Normale, being dropped from the list of professors, owing to his conversion to Catholicism, when the school was reorganized in 1905. He lectured in the United States in 1897.

He was decorated with the Legion of Honour in 1887, and became a member of the Académie française in 1893.

He possessed vast erudition and unflinching courage. He was never afraid to diverge from the established critical view. The most honest, if not the most impartial, of magisterial writers, he had a hatred of the unreal, and a contempt for the trivial; nobody was more merciless towards the pretentious. On the other hand, his intolerance, his sledge-hammer methods of attack and a certain dry pedantry alienated the sympathies of many who recognized his remarkable intellect.

He is consider as the greatest French critic of the last twenty years of the 19th century.

He died 9 December 1906, Paris.