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André Beucler
French writer
1898 - 1985

A look at a life
(biographical milestones)

First part



Biography First part

Foreword
1898 - 1920 Adolescence between St. Petersburg and Montbeliard
1920 - 1924 Odd jobs

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Foreword

A French literary figure, a writer of memoirs, Andre Beucler was born in St. Petersburg on 23rd February 1898.

He was the privileged friend and often the fellow-traveller of some very distinguished literary and artisitic figures. He refers to some of them in four volumes of portraits and memoirs : Marcel Achard, Marcel Aymé, Emmanuel Berl, Pierre Bonnard, Pierre Bost, Emmanuel Bove, Pierre Brasseur, André Cayatte, Blaise Cendrars, André Chamson, Jean Cocteau, René Crevel, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Robert Desnos, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Alfred Fabre-Luce, Léon-Paul Fargue, Jean Gabin, Gaston Gallimard, Jean Giraudoux, Max Jacob, Louis Jouvet, Louis Joxe, Joseph Kessel, Valéry Larbaud, Marie Laurencin, Pierre Mac Orlan, André Malraux, Roger Martin du Gard, Paul Morand, Jean Prévost, Saint-John Perse, Paul Valéry…

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His particularly rich biography makes it difficult to summarize. A central feature of his private life was that he married the same woman three times (1928 - 1945 - 1964). The beautiful Natacha, born in Saint Petersburg in 1907, half Russian like him, she fascinated fashionable Paris. Having met in France in 1927, they had two sons from their successive unions, Serge and Roland. She outlived Beucler by just one year.

As for "honours" - on which he set little value - it is important to say all the same that Beucler was, like Alexandre Vialatte and Marcel Ayme, an awardwinner of the Blumenthal Foundation, which, during the Twenties, was very prestigious, and that three times he missed the Goncourt although his editor had maintained high hopes - deep down this reassured them that his writing really was modern. However, although there was no getting away from the Rosettes of the Legion d'Honneur and of the Arts et Lettres, he accepted with pleasure in 1981 the Grand Prix de la Societe des Gens de Lettres for his entire work.

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1898 - 1920
Adolescence between
St. Petersburg and Montbéliard
To speak of Beucler also means to become immersed in Central Asia where he travelled with his parents during the long holidays. For the eight year old child that he was, adventure did not only exist on coloured maps of the atlas: Oural, The Caucasus, Turkestan and Samarkand, he knew them first hand! While much younger even than his future friend Cendrars, Beucler had "lived" Transsiberia as far as Vladisvostock.

His father, Jules, a lutherian from Montbéliard stock, had been sent to Russia by the Quai d'Orsay to teach French at the Law School and the Imperial Military School for Cadet Officers. French was compulsory at that time. In St. Petersburg he married Marie, General Souvorkoff's daughter, and it is here that, on 23rd February 1898, Andre Beucler began his existence.

He is still a child when his father organises his first trip by train from St. Petersburg to Belfort, alone with his brother who is a year younger. They become boarders first at the secondary school in Belfort and later in Besançon. Here, they engage in many sports; boxing, fencing, cycling and football. Andre is rowdy but brilliant.

At the secondary school in Besançon, the young Andre Beucler was to have among other teachers Albert Thibaudet, already an influential critic. Thanks to him, Beucler would experience the "Giraudoux flash", would also discover Jules Romains, who, he admits, had a great influence on his own desire to write.
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In 1916 he enrols at the Sorbonne in Paris, but is called up in April 1917 to the heavy artillery. Wounded on the front, he is assigned to a German prisoner camp in Charleville as interpreter until April 1920. Once discharged, he learns of his mother's death (3rd March 1920), shortly after her arrival as a refugee with his father in the family house of Bondeval in the Doubs county, having lost everything in Russia.
 
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1920 - 1924
Odd jobs
Beucler dreamed of becoming a painter, but to make a living, has to do a succession of odd jobs: by turns he is draughtsman, sells colour postcards, is a salesman for quality paper, is in charge of the correspondance for the Counter of Sheet-Metal and Plates, and becomes secretary-general for the first university news newspaper. As their correspondent to the Chamber of Deputies at the time of the well-known "latin quarrel", he meets Leon Daudet and the Minister of Public Instruction, Leon Berard.

He undertakes a series of important interviews: Anatole France, Maurice Barres, Paul Bourget, Henri Bergson, Anna de Noailles, who are already these "stars who have made their mark" on a century of change. And then he is sub-editor of Fantasio-Le-Rire, a great graphic era with Poulbot, Leandre, and the "young ones", Vertes, Chas Laborde, Dignimont, Sennep...
 
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