Author of the saga Des grives aux loups, Claude Michelet, who died at the age of 83, was a “peasant-writer” who sold millions of books, standard-bearer of popular literature far from the great literary prizes Parisians.
His so-called local novels, reflections of the rural society of the last century, had an immense impact on the French conscience. Robert Laffont editions count nearly 3 million copies sold. With Des grives aux loups, success since its publication in 1979, followed by three other family novels (Les palombes n’passera plus; L’appel des engoulevents; La terre des Vialhe), he is part of the tradition of popular novels of the Nineteenth century.
It was in the mid-1970s during the Brive book fair that a group of writers, gathered around Jacques Peuchmaurd, literary director at Robert Laffont, created the “school of Brive”. We find there Claude Michelet, Gilbert Bordes, Jean-Guy Soumy or Colette Laussac. Because Claude Michelet is a child of Corrèze. Born in Brive on May 30, 1938, he was the last of seven children (what he recounts in his childhood memories Once Seven, 1970). In 1945, he moved to Paris where his father, Edmond Michelet, back from Dachau, was appointed Minister of the Armed Forces by General de Gaulle. He pays homage to this resistant Catholic in My Father Edmond Michelet (1971).
Until 1952, the turbulent child lived in Paris but dreamed of his Corrèze countryside where the family owned an estate, a former refuge for the maquisards. From the age of 14, he decides that he will be a farmer. After training at the agricultural school of Lancosme (Indre), he left for military service in Algeria (1958-1960). “Called to Algeria (…), he never quite returned, like all those of his generation,” his youngest son Jean-Marc told AFP, announcing his death.
He moved to Marcillac in 1960 in the family home. With nineteen hectares of fallow land, five cows and a heifer, he set to work. In I chose the earth (1975), he very simply describes his years of hard work punctuated by successes and failures. Through this first success, he became the voice of thousands of small farmers often confused by agrarian reforms.
Throughout the pages, he devotes a tenacious resentment to technocrats, planners and economists. Passionate about the peasant cause, he wants to demonstrate that these thousands of farms that dot the country are the mark of French identity. With Des grives aux loups, consecrated in 1980 by the Booksellers’ Prize, Claude Michelet sold more than 500,000 copies in a few months. It tells the 20th century story of the Vialhe family established in the village of Saint-Libéral (Corrèze).
The style is simple, the pages are punctuated by wars, generational conflicts, technical revolutions but also loves, marriages and bereavements. The story of a French family like there were millions and a village like there were thousands. With his breeding of Limousin cows but also thanks to the success of his saga, he raised his six children. A health problem soon forced him to reduce his agricultural activity. Scorned by critics, he is accused of writing sub-literature. “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t deserve any response,” he retorted in Le Parisien in 2000. “The main thing is that I’m not cut off from my readers.”
“Being popular is knowing how to tell a story while learning things. (…) The navel-gazing novels turn in my eyes a little in circles. They come from writers who spend their time making psychoanalysis in public what the public does not give a damn about”.
