Georges Rodenbach

Belgian lawyer,journalist and writer. Georges Rodenbach was born into an aristocratic family with German roots. The patriarch of the family Ferdinand Rodenbach was surgeon in the Austrian army, Georges’ grandfather was surgeon in the army of Napoleon. The influential Rodenbach family also founded brewery Rodenbach.

Georges Rodenbach studied at the Jesuits school in Gent. He then studied law, first in Gent and later in Paris. In Paris Georges met Catulle Mendès, François Coppée, Maurice Barrès . In 1879 he started as a bar lawyer in Gent and as a journalist for La Jeune Belgique, he befriended Maurice Maeterlinck and Charles van Lerberghe.

He left Belgium for Paris in 1888 to become a full-time writer and poet, he wrote for Le Figaro and became familiar with many artists of the time, Auguste Rodin, Alphonse Daudet, Edmont de Goncourt, the latter was one of his closest friends. He produced some Parisian and purely imitative work; but a major part of his production is the outcome of a passionate idealism of the quiet Flemish towns in which he had passed his childhood and early youth. In his best known work, Bruges-la-Morte (1892), he explains that his aim is to evoke the town as a living being, associated with the moods of the spirit, counseling, dissuading from and prompting action. Bruges-la-Morte was used by the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold as the basis for his opera Die Tote Stadt.

Georges Rodenbach was a man with many friends: Félicien Rops, Jules Chéret, Alfred Stevens, Jan Toorop, Georges de Feure, Odilon Redon, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Jean-François Raffaëlli, Albert Besnard, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Eugène Carrière, Puvis de Chavannes and others.

Georges married in 1888 with Anne-Marie Urbain and they had one son in 1892. Georges died at the age of 43. He is buried at Père-Lachaise Paris.