Edmond Jaloux

Edmond Jaloux was a French writer and literary critic. After attending the Lycée de Marseille, he founded the small periodical Méditerranéenne at the age of eighteen, before working for major magazines. He worked in the French Foreign Ministry from 1917-23. In 1918, he went to Switzerland on a literary mission for the government and from then on spent many summers there before settling permanently near Lausanne in 1937. There, he stayed during the Second World War and until he died in 1949.

Jaloux’s articles drew the attention of the public to modern foreign literature. He was particularly interested in German Romanticism and English writers. Many of these articles and essays were later published in collections. Two volumes of his Introduction to the History of French Literature were released in Switzerland. In 1930, he wrote the preface of the French edition of the scandalous book Sleeveless Errand by Norah C. James (1896-1979). He also wrote several melancholy and psychological novels, sometimes with surrealist elements. His works are mostly set in Paris or his native Provence.

After failing to be voted into the Académie française in 1934, Jaloux was eventually elected in 1936. Working as a literary columnist for the Gazette de Lausanne, the Journal de Genève and _Radio-Lausanne, he published a collection of thoughts, aphorisms, and maxims under the title Essences (1944, 1947). He was also the initiator and co-founder of the “Société de poésie de Lausanne”. For his posthumously published works, his wife Germaine (1890-?) received the Prix Louis-Barthou in 1950.