Marcel

Prévost, Marcel, 1862-1941, French novelist. His novels deal chiefly with feminine questions, portraying severely what Prévost regarded as the moral frailty of modern woman. He won fame with The Demi-Virgins (1894, tr. 1895) in which he attacks feminism. His Lettres à Françoise (1902-12) presents his program for the ideal education of a girl. The combination of mysticism and eroticism in Retraite ardente (1927) aroused protests from the Roman Catholic clergy.

Marceau, Marcel, 1923-2007, French mime, b. Strasbourg as Marcel Mangel. Marceau studied under Charles Dullin and master mime Étienne Decroux in Paris. He gained renown in 1947 with the creation of Bip, a silent, sad, white-faced clown with a battered stovepipe hat decorated with a limp red flower. Almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of the art of mime in modern times, he performed an average of 200 shows a year, most of them outside France. Marceau and his Compagnie de Mimodrame (est. 1949) appeared frequently in the United States from 1955 to 2000. In 1978 he founded the Ecole de mimodrame de Paris, which has trained hundreds of performers. Marceau appeared in more than a dozen films, including Un jardin public (1955), and also made lithographs and wrote children's books.

Marcel, Étienne, d. 1358, French bourgeois leader, provost of the merchants of Paris. In the States-General of 1355 he and Robert Le Coq bargained for governmental reforms with the French king, John II, who needed funds for the English war. After John's capture (1356) by the English, Marcel dealt with the dauphin (later Charles V). In 1357, the dauphin was forced to agree to the Grande Ordonnance, which granted the States-General far-reaching powers. Shortly afterward, Charles managed to escape from Paris and raise an army. Marcel's popularity waned, partly because of his alliance with Charles II of Navarre, who coveted the throne, and partly because of his intrigues with the English. The dauphin's troops besieged Paris, and on July 31, 1358, a royalist faction assassinated Marcel as a traitor; the dauphin then entered Paris.

Marcel, Gabriel 1889-1973, French philosopher, dramatist, and critic, b. Paris. A leading Christian existentialist, he became a Roman Catholic in 1929. He called himself a "concrete philosopher," indicating a reaction to his early idealism. He saw philosophy not as formulation of a system but rather as a personal reflection on the human situation. He held that the philosopher must be engagé, or personally involved, because existence and the human person are more significant than any abstraction. Involvement must be with other persons. To counter the impersonality of the mechanistic modern world and to recall man to an awareness of the mystery of being, Marcel spoke of the development of the individual in person-to-person dialogue. Human existence finds its earthly satisfaction in a God-centered communion of persons that is characterized by mutual fidelity and hope. His chief works include Metaphysical Journal (1927), Being and Having (1935), The Mystery of Being (1950), Presence and Immortality (1959), and a collection of essays, Philosophy of Existentialism (1961). His best-known plays are Un Homme de Dieu (1925) and Le Chemin de Crete (1936).

Pagnol, Marcel, 1895-1974, French dramatist and film director. Pagnol gained recognition for his trilogy of sentimental comedies set on the Marseilles waterfront—Marius (1929), Fanny (1931), and César (1936)—for which he wrote the screenplays (1931, 1932, 1934). He used César for his directorial debut. Other films include The Well-Digger's Daughter (1940) and Letters from My Windmill (1955). Merlusse (1935, tr. 1937) embodies Pagnol's theories of the film art. His other works include the plays Judas (1956) and Angèle (1970). In 1986, the two-part film Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, based on Pagnol's novel The Water of the Hills (1962), met great success. His reminiscences form the basis of two critically acclaimed 1991 films, My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle.

Aymé, Marcel, 1902-67, French writer. Aymé's La Table aux crevés (1929), a story of peasant life, typifies the satirical tone of his works. La Jument verte (1933, tr. The Green Mare, 1955) and Les Tiroirs de l'inconnu (1960, tr. The Conscience of Love, 1962) contain elements of fantasy and biting commentary on modern values. Aymé wrote several superb volumes of tales for children, including Les Contes du chat perché (1934, tr. The Wonderful Farm, 1951). Among his plays are Clérambard (1949, tr. 1952) and La Těte des autres (1952). Two collections of his short stories are Across Paris (tr. 1958) and The Proverb (tr. 1961).

Arland, Marcel, 1899-1986, French writer. Arland was editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française (1953-77). Emphasizing a search for salvation that is both ethical and aesthetic, his work includes the novels L'Ordre (1929) and A perdre haleine [out of breath] (1960). He also wrote many essays and short stories.

Ophüls, Marcel: see under Ophüls, Max.

Mauss, Marcel, 1872-1950, French sociologist and anthropologist. Nephew of eminant sociologist Émile Durkheim, Mauss graduated from the Univ. of Bordeaux and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he later served on the faculty. He also taught at the Collège de France and cofounded the Institut d'Ethnologie of the Univ. of Paris. Advocating a close relationship between anthropology and psychology, he sought to practice Durkheim's rules of sociological method by relating the collective representations of a group to its social organization. He studied the phenomena of primitive exchange as a total institution that structures social bonds and found that although giving, receiving, and repaying appear to be voluntary and disinterested, they are in fact obligatory and interested. Mauss's writings include The Gift (1925), a well-known work on the process of exchange, and a collection of essays entitled Sociology and Anthropology (1950).

Duchamp, Marcel, 1887-1968, French painter, brother of Raymond Duchamp-Villon and half-brother of Jacques Villon. Duchamp is noted for his cubist-futurist painting Nude Descending a Staircase, depicting continuous action with a series of overlapping figures; it was the cause of great controversy when exhibited in 1913 at the New York Armory Show. Duchamp invented ready-mades—commonplace objects—e.g., the urinal entitled Fountain, which he exhibited as works of art. In 1915 he was a co-founder of a Dada group in New York. After 1920, Duchamp produced a series of elaborate nonfunctional machines. He emigrated to the United States in 1942. Many of his works, including the celebrated symbolic construction The Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors, even (1915-23), are at the Philadelphia Mus. of Art.

Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922, French novelist, b. Paris. He is one of the great literary figures of the modern age. Born to wealthy bourgeois parents, he suffered delicate health as a child and was carefully ministered to by his mother. As a young man he ambitiously mingled in high Parisian society and wrote his rather unpromising first work, Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896; tr. Pleasures and Regrets, 1948; new tr. Pleasures and Days, 1957). Troubled by asthma and neuroses, as well as by the deaths of his parents, he increasingly withdrew from external life and after 1907 lived mainly in a cork-lined room, working at night on his monumental cyclic novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (16 vol., 1913-27; tr. Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-32, rev. tr. In Search of Lost Time, 1992; new tr. 2002).

The first of the novel cycle, Du côté de chez Swann (1913, tr. Swann's Way, 1928) went unnoticed, but the second, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919, tr. Within a Budding Grove, 1919), was awarded the Goncourt Prize. Proust's semiautobiographical novel cycle is superficially concerned with its hero's development through childhood and through youthful love affairs to the point of commitment to literary endeavor. It is less a story than an interior monologue. Discursive, but alive with brilliant metaphor and sense imagery, the work is rich in psychological, philosophical, and sociological understanding. A vital theme is the link between external and internal reality found in time and memory, to which Proust sees humanity's strivings subjugated—time mocks the individual's intelligence and endeavors; memory synthesizes yet distorts past experience. Most experience causes inner pain, and the objects of human desires are the chief causes of their suffering.

In Proust's scheme the individual is isolated, society is false and ruled by snobbery, and artistic endeavor is raised to a religion and is superior to nature. Only through the vision gained in works of art can the individual see beyond his or her subjective experience. Proust's ability to interpret innermost experience in terms of such eternal forces as time and death created a profound and protean world view and his work has influenced generations of novelists and thinkers. His vision and technique have come to be seen as vital to the development of modernism. Most of his correspondence has been published (21 vol., P. Kolb, ed., 1970-93), as has his draft of an early novel, Jean Santeuil (1952, tr. 1955), and Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954, tr. On Art and Literature, 1896-1919, 1958).

Cachin, Marcel, 1869-1958, French Communist leader. An early leader of the Socialist party, he was instrumental in bringing many Socialists into the first French Communist party in 1920. Long the leader of the Communists in the chamber of deputies and editor of the Communist daily Humanité, he became the first Communist senator in 1935. He was expelled from his seat after the German-Soviet nonaggression pact in Aug., 1939, and was subsequently arrested. In 1945 he was elected to the national assembly, where he sat until his death.

(born July 10, 1871, Auteuil, near Paris, France—died Nov. 18, 1922, Paris) French novelist. Born to a wealthy family, he studied law and literature. His social connections allowed him to become an observant habitué of the most exclusive drawing rooms of the nobility, and he wrote social pieces for Parisian journals. He published essays and stories, including the story collection Pleasures and Days (1896). He had suffered from asthma since childhood, and circa 1897 he began to disengage from social life as his health declined. Half-Jewish himself, he became a major supporter of Alfred Dreyfus in the affair that made French anti-Semitism into a national issue. Deeply affected by his mother's death in 1905, he withdrew further from society. An incident of involuntary revival of childhood memory in 1909 led him to retire almost totally into an eccentric seclusion in his cork-lined bedroom to write À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past). The vast seven-part novel is at once a kind of autobiography, a vast social panorama of France in the years just before and during World War I, and an immense meditation on love and jealousy and on art and its relation to reality. One of the supreme achievements in fiction of all time, it brought him worldwide fame and affected the entire climate of the 20th-century novel.

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(born Jan. 7, 1899, Paris, Fr.—died Jan. 30, 1963, Paris) French composer. In his teens he studied piano with Ricardo Viñes (1875–1943). Influenced by Erik Satie, Poulenc and five other like-minded young composers became known as Les Six. Poulenc wrote piano compositions, orchestral music, and chamber music, but he is best known for his vocal music, including many admired songs, the operas The Breasts of Tiresias (1944), Dialogues of the Carmelites (1956), and La voix humaine (1958), and such sacred choral works as Mass in G Major (1937), the Stabat Mater (1950), and the Gloria (1959), reflecting his devout Catholicism.

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(born May 10, 1872, Épinal, Fr.—died Feb. 10, 1950, Paris) French sociologist and anthropologist. Mauss was the nephew of Émile Durkheim, who contributed much to his intellectual formation and with whom he collaborated in such important works as Suicide (1897) and Primitive Classification (1901–02). His most influential independent work was The Gift (1925), a highly original comparative study of the relation between forms of gift exchange and social structure. He taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and Collège de France and cofounded the University of Paris's Institut d'Ethnologie. His views on ethnological theory and method influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronisław Malinowski, and Edward Evans-Pritchard.

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(born July 10, 1871, Auteuil, near Paris, France—died Nov. 18, 1922, Paris) French novelist. Born to a wealthy family, he studied law and literature. His social connections allowed him to become an observant habitué of the most exclusive drawing rooms of the nobility, and he wrote social pieces for Parisian journals. He published essays and stories, including the story collection Pleasures and Days (1896). He had suffered from asthma since childhood, and circa 1897 he began to disengage from social life as his health declined. Half-Jewish himself, he became a major supporter of Alfred Dreyfus in the affair that made French anti-Semitism into a national issue. Deeply affected by his mother's death in 1905, he withdrew further from society. An incident of involuntary revival of childhood memory in 1909 led him to retire almost totally into an eccentric seclusion in his cork-lined bedroom to write À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past). The vast seven-part novel is at once a kind of autobiography, a vast social panorama of France in the years just before and during World War I, and an immense meditation on love and jealousy and on art and its relation to reality. One of the supreme achievements in fiction of all time, it brought him worldwide fame and affected the entire climate of the 20th-century novel.

Learn more about Proust, Marcel with a free trial on Britannica.com.

(born May 10, 1872, Épinal, Fr.—died Feb. 10, 1950, Paris) French sociologist and anthropologist. Mauss was the nephew of Émile Durkheim, who contributed much to his intellectual formation and with whom he collaborated in such important works as Suicide (1897) and Primitive Classification (1901–02). His most influential independent work was The Gift (1925), a highly original comparative study of the relation between forms of gift exchange and social structure. He taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and Collège de France and cofounded the University of Paris's Institut d'Ethnologie. His views on ethnological theory and method influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronisław Malinowski, and Edward Evans-Pritchard.

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orig. Marcel Mangel

(born March 22, 1923, Strasbourg, France—died Sept. 22, 2007, Cahors) French mime. After serving in World War II, he studied with the pantomimist Étienne Decroux and had his first success in the role of Arlequin in Baptiste. He formed a mime troupe (1949–64) and earned worldwide acclaim in the 1950s with his production of the “mimodrama” of Nikolay Gogol's Overcoat. In 1978 he founded a school of mimodrama in Paris. He was noted for his eloquent, deceptively simple portrayals, including his celebrated white-faced character Bip, reminiscent of Pierrot and of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp. Marceau, who also acted in several movies, retired from performing in 2005. Seealso mime and pantomime.

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(born May 21, 1902, Pécs, Hung.—died July 1, 1981, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Hungarian-U.S. architect and furniture designer. He studied and then taught at the Bauhaus (1920–28), where in 1925 he invented the famous tubular steel chair. He moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1937 to teach at Harvard University and practice with Walter Gropius. Their synthesis of Bauhaus internationalism with New England regional wood-frame building greatly influenced domestic architecture throughout the U.S. He was one of the most influential exponents of the International Style. His major architectural commissions include UNESCO's Paris headquarters (1953–58) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1966).

Learn more about Breuer, Marcel (Lajos) with a free trial on Britannica.com.

(born July 28, 1887, Blainville, France—died Oct. 2, 1968, Neuilly) French artist and art innovator. In 1913 he caused a sensation at the Armory Show with his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which combined the principles of Cubism and Futurism. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards then led him to devise his famous ready-mades: in 1913 he exhibited Bicycle Wheel, which was simply an ordinary bicycle wheel displayed as a work of art, and in 1917 he exhibited a urinal he enh1d Fountain. Intended as a derisive gesture against the excessive importance attached to works of art, the ready-mades ushered in an era when contemporary art became in itself a mixture of creation and criticism. In Paris in 1919 he established contact with the Dada group of artists, whose nihilistic ideas he had anticipated. During this period he exhibited a photograph of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee added, a gesture that expressed the Dadaists' scorn for the art of the past. He greatly influenced the Surrealists, and his attitude toward art and society led to Pop art and other modern and postmodern movements. A legend in his lifetime, he is considered one of the leading spirits of 20th-century art.

Learn more about Duchamp, Marcel with a free trial on Britannica.com.

orig. Marcel Mangel

(born March 22, 1923, Strasbourg, France—died Sept. 22, 2007, Cahors) French mime. After serving in World War II, he studied with the pantomimist Étienne Decroux and had his first success in the role of Arlequin in Baptiste. He formed a mime troupe (1949–64) and earned worldwide acclaim in the 1950s with his production of the “mimodrama” of Nikolay Gogol's Overcoat. In 1978 he founded a school of mimodrama in Paris. He was noted for his eloquent, deceptively simple portrayals, including his celebrated white-faced character Bip, reminiscent of Pierrot and of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp. Marceau, who also acted in several movies, retired from performing in 2005. Seealso mime and pantomime.

Learn more about Marceau, Marcel with a free trial on Britannica.com.

(born Jan. 7, 1899, Paris, Fr.—died Jan. 30, 1963, Paris) French composer. In his teens he studied piano with Ricardo Viñes (1875–1943). Influenced by Erik Satie, Poulenc and five other like-minded young composers became known as Les Six. Poulenc wrote piano compositions, orchestral music, and chamber music, but he is best known for his vocal music, including many admired songs, the operas The Breasts of Tiresias (1944), Dialogues of the Carmelites (1956), and La voix humaine (1958), and such sacred choral works as Mass in G Major (1937), the Stabat Mater (1950), and the Gloria (1959), reflecting his devout Catholicism.

Learn more about Poulenc, Francis (Jean Marcel) with a free trial on Britannica.com.

(born July 28, 1887, Blainville, France—died Oct. 2, 1968, Neuilly) French artist and art innovator. In 1913 he caused a sensation at the Armory Show with his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which combined the principles of Cubism and Futurism. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards then led him to devise his famous ready-mades: in 1913 he exhibited Bicycle Wheel, which was simply an ordinary bicycle wheel displayed as a work of art, and in 1917 he exhibited a urinal he enh1d Fountain. Intended as a derisive gesture against the excessive importance attached to works of art, the ready-mades ushered in an era when contemporary art became in itself a mixture of creation and criticism. In Paris in 1919 he established contact with the Dada group of artists, whose nihilistic ideas he had anticipated. During this period he exhibited a photograph of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee added, a gesture that expressed the Dadaists' scorn for the art of the past. He greatly influenced the Surrealists, and his attitude toward art and society led to Pop art and other modern and postmodern movements. A legend in his lifetime, he is considered one of the leading spirits of 20th-century art.

Learn more about Duchamp, Marcel with a free trial on Britannica.com.

(born May 21, 1902, Pécs, Hung.—died July 1, 1981, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Hungarian-U.S. architect and furniture designer. He studied and then taught at the Bauhaus (1920–28), where in 1925 he invented the famous tubular steel chair. He moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1937 to teach at Harvard University and practice with Walter Gropius. Their synthesis of Bauhaus internationalism with New England regional wood-frame building greatly influenced domestic architecture throughout the U.S. He was one of the most influential exponents of the International Style. His major architectural commissions include UNESCO's Paris headquarters (1953–58) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1966).

Learn more about Breuer, Marcel (Lajos) with a free trial on Britannica.com.

Saint-Marcel-lès-Annonay is a commune in the Ardèche department in southeastern France.

The village was founded in 972. The Deûme passes through Saint-Marcel and flows into the Cance with Annonay. Water from these rivers come from the granitic areas and is very pure. Their patent rights have been recognized for several centuries with the rise of paper mills. The paper mills of Annonay by Montgolfier-Canson formed only two groups in the 18th century from Vidalon and Faya.

In 1805, Jean-Baptiste de Montgolfier was detached from Vidalon to create a factory in Saint-Marcel. Paper production was a large contributor to the rise of the commune and was the main industry for a long period of time. The employees of paper mills were called les usines, French for factory and formed the integral part of their culture and life.

The small commune formed only industrial and is residential today, the picturesque buildings mixed with modern buildings.

See also

• Communes of the Ardèche department

References

Based on the article in the French Wikipedia.

External links

• Saint-Marcel-lès-Annonay official website