| François Mauriac as we can still love him

Although the society and social mores that François Mauriac depicts in his work seem to have long since disappeared, his writing style makes him a surprisingly relevant author.

François Mauriac is one of those literary figures about whom too little is said in Switzerland. Yet in France, where many still take pleasure in commenting on some of his political stances, he is still admired for his delicate and incisive style. For François Mauriac was, first and foremost, a writer of his homeland—the Landes de Gascogne—where he spent much of his youth in a society characterized by strict and rigid customs. Born in 1885 into a family of the Bordeaux upper middle class, he remained a man of the nineteenth century throughout his life. But despite the Barresian undertones in the novels he wrote, he managed to create a body of work whose youthful sensibility will always astonish us.