Éric Rohmer

A Biography

Antoine de Baecque, Noël Herpe, Steven Rendall, Lisa Neal, Steven Rendall, Lisa Neal

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231541572
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

The director of twenty-five films, including My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and the editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Éric Rohmer set the terms by which people watched, made, and thought about cinema for decades. Such brilliance does not develop in a vacuum, and Rohmer cultivated a fascinating network of friends, colleagues, and industry contacts that kept his outlook sharp and propelled his work forward. Despite his privacy, he cared deeply about politics, religion, culture, and fostering a public appreciation of the medium he loved.

This exhaustive biography uses personal archives and interviews to enrich our knowledge of Rohmer's public achievements and lesser known interests and relations. The filmmaker kept in close communication with his contemporaries and competitors: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. He held a paradoxical fascination with royalist politics, the fate of the environment, Catholicism, classical music, and the French nightclub scene, and his films were regularly featured at New York and Los Angeles film festivals. Despite an austere approach to life, Rohmer had a voracious appetite for art, culture, and intellectual debate captured vividly in this definitive volume.

Maurice Schérer’s Youth

1920–1945

Éric Rohmer was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle, a manufacturing town in central France, on March 21, 1920.¹ His father’s family came from Alsace, its main branch having earlier lived in Still, twenty kilometers west of Molsheim, in the foothills of the Vosges mountains. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the men had worked either in crafts connected with the wine trade or in armaments manufacturing. An even older family tradition among Maurice Schérer’s ancestors was blacksmithing. The secondary branch of the family was from Lorraine, and lived in Château-Salins or Lafrimbolle in the department of Moselle. After the French defeat in 1870 and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the German Empire, a considerable number of the Schérer’s compatriots, who were patriotic Catholics, resettled in France. Maurice’s grandfather, Laurent Schérer, a gunsmith, chose Tulle, where he found a job at the national armaments factory in the Souilhac quarter. He married Antoinette Vialle, a laundrywoman who came from a family that had long lived in Tulle. Her only son, Désiré Antoine Louis, born in 1877, was for many years the family’s main support; declared unfit for military service in 1914, he became a department head at the prefecture. In 1919, after the death of his mother, he met and married Jeanne Marie Monzat, nine years his junior, the youngest of four daughters who came from Corrèze. Their grandfather owned a farm in Saint-Mexant; their father, born in Tulle in 1850, was a notary’s clerk and an employee at the national treasury office. He took up residence on the street where the Schérers lived.

A Life in Tulle

Schérer’s parents soon bought an old house in the style typical of the area, built in the late seventeenth century, tall and overlooking the banks of the Corrèze River. There Maurice and his brother René were born in 1920 and 1922 into a middle-class family that had risen socially, since its starting point had been lower-class on both sides; Désiré Schérer’s father had been an artisan, his mother a peasant. Désiré, whose health was fragile, was an anxious, fearful man who was almost forty-five when his eldest son was born. He worked as a minor official in charge of the office of trades and commerce at the prefecture, which allowed his wife to stop working and raise the two boys. “It was not an upper-middle-class milieu,” René Schérer noted. “But there was a little money, a house, a social status, and especially many traditions. An ordinary family, not even caught up in History.”² The tradition combined Catholic observance with a Puritan family morality. In a city that was dominated by the moderate left and voted radical-socialist well into the 1940s, the Schérer family leaned toward conservatism, but never to excess. Its opinions, particularly in matters of politics and religion, were colored by royalist sentiments. Similarly, its culture was under Germanic influence, but its reflexes continued to be opposed to the German Empire, in memory of the humiliations suffered after the capitulation of 1870, and it quickly became anti-Hitler when dangers increased during the 1930s. That did not prevent the father, Désiré, from having to cope with rumors resulting from the foreign sound of his patronymic: he was accused of being “a Prussian” or even an “infiltrated spy” within the prefecture, as was alleged by Angèle Laval, the notorious Tulle informer and the author of a multitude of anonymous letters during the 1920s. Henri-Georges Clouzot took the inspiration for his film Le Corbeau from her.

Désiré and Jeanne Schérer were concerned about the future of their two sons and monitored their education closely. The three Monzat aunts, Jeanne’s sisters, had strong personalities: they were all teachers in private schools, the two older sisters being secondary-school teachers of French at the École Sainte-Marie-Jeanne-d’Arc, and the third a primary-school teacher at the École Sévigné. The eldest, “Aunt Mathilde,” played a role in the region as head of local associations and a columnist for the newspaper L’Écho. The youngest sister had three daughters, Régine, Geneviève, and Éliane, to whom the two Schérer sons were close during their childhood and adolescence.

This whole family group lived together in the home at 95, rue de la Barrière, a narrow lane that ran steeply uphill in front of the cathedral. The two maiden aunts occupied the two upper floors of this narrow, white, six-story building on the slope of one of the city’s hills, squeezed between two other buildings of the same kind. The two lower levels, above a cobbler’s shop that gave on the street, were occupied by the Schérers, while the intermediate fourth story opened onto a little garden located in back of the house; it had circular terraces on three levels that were covered with vegetation. On the other side of the wall surrounding the property, a path led toward the heights above the city and, a little further on, to the Lycée Edmond-Perrier, which Maurice and René attended. In the early 1940s, Maurice wrote about this path “crossing the Corrèze River by the Escurol bridge, and climbing the slope on the other side, no less steep.”³ The big house gradually filled up with the two boys’ toys and possessions. They shared a bedroom and transformed the attic into a play space. The garden, poorly maintained and wild, was another important site of this shared childhood and youth, and aroused Schérer’s early interest in nature. From the front of the house, the view extended to the Corrèze River below and to the hills across the valley, where the dense forest began. “When I was little,” Éric Rohmer wrote later, “there was almost nothing between the house and the river. There was an embankment beside the river, and along it, a site where a Jesuit school had once stood […] which was called ‘the ruins.’ In these ruins the neighborhood children went to play, especially ‘the hooligans.’ For in this city there was a subtle difference between the bourgeois and the workers: their houses were on the same streets but even as a little boy I could tell the difference between them. I knew that in the bourgeois houses the floor was waxed, and that it was not in the workers’ homes; in one group people ate in the dining room, in the other they ate in the kitchen (because there was no dining room).”⁴ Maurice and René Schérer were first of all boys from Tulle. Their attachment to the “city of seven hills,” which was the seat of the prefecture of the department of Corrèze and had a population of fourteen thousand after the First World War, was deeply rooted. The city was neither particularly attractive nor terribly seductive: a quiet small town of industries and trades that lived on lace-making, armaments manufacturing, the Maugein accordion factory, and especially the imposing departmental administration and the garrison of the 100th Infantry Regiment; it was seldom given more than three or four lines in tourist brochures. “Tulle spreads its old quarter over the slopes of the hills, extending for three kilometers in the narrow, winding valley of the Corrèze, while at its heart emerges the elegant stone spire of the Notre Dame cathedral.”⁵ The local glory was long the Tulle Sporting Club, the “blue and whites,” a good rugby club that was soon rivaled and supplanted by the neighboring “black and whites” from Brive.

Maurice Schérer, a Tulle boy at heart, found other charms in his hometown—and preferred the athletic Union of Tulle-Corrèze, a basketball club, where he was a registered member. In his last years, Éric Rohmer took an interest in scholarly journals, the cartulary dating from the end of the ninth century, and archeological and historical works on the city—he was a member of the Society of Letters, Sciences, and Arts of Corrèze—and wrote two very learned works on the etymology of the city’s name and on the complex hydrographic network of the region of “Tulle, goddess of the springs.” We see in this Rohmer’s attachment to his city. He had an intimate knowledge of it, based on regular walks, a knowledge more bodily and sensual than bookish: “The Tulle area is a lovely plateau, a peneplain easy to travel through, with a temperate climate, arable lands, rich in pastures, a plateau cut by the deep gorges of the Corrèze, Montane, Céronne, Solane, and Saint-Bonnette rivers, in which there is no traffic and no habitation, except in Tulle itself. The towns that are dotted along these gorges, Corrèze, Bar, and Aubazine, are perched on the heights, disdaining the lowlands. Tulle is the only town that is built in the valley.”⁶ For Tulle, Rohmer had the love of a “pedestrian geographer.” As a boy and until late in his life, he loved to take the same walks through the leafy, steep forests to the falls at Gimel, on the Montane, and to the Moines canal, a beautiful aqueduct built near the eleventh-century Romanesque abbey, not far from the town of Aubazine. He even proposed another etymology for the name of the city: in the Limousin patois, “tuel” is supposed to translate to English as “hole.” According to Rohmer’s hypothesis, Tulle owes its name not to “tutelle” (trusteeship), as most historians of the region think, but to its unique function of providing access to the river, to its rare situation in the bottom of the valley. Thus for Rohmer, it is the topology of the terrain that makes it possible to reexamine history and its etymological assumptions.

The Roots of Early Passions

The two Schérer brothers received their primary and elementary education at the École Sévigné, a girls’ school to which they were admitted thanks to the recommendation of their aunt, who taught there. They were good students and continued their studies at the Lycée Edmond-Perrier, a large building dating from the end of the nineteenth century that was situated on the heights above the city, had extensive grounds, and could enroll as many as a thousand students. Maurice excelled in all his subjects; he was gifted in languages, took a keen interest in Latin and Greek, especially composition, and was a great reader, but he was also good in mathematics. His studies led him to a double baccalaureate in philosophy and mathematics, which he obtained with the very high average score of 17 in July 1937, at the age of seventeen. René did even better; he was an exceptional student who passed his examination at sixteen with a score of 18. Education was held in high regard by the family; “professors” were greatly esteemed by Désiré and Jeanne Schérer, who were themselves surrounded by teachers.

The two Schérer boys were excellent students and already extremely cultivated for their ages. Book culture was a high value for the family, and books were physically present in the living room and the father’s study. Désiré worshipped certain authors—Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Roland Dorgelès—and meticulously clipped articles from the book section of the Figaro newspaper. For their part, the two sons venerated Jules Verne and the Countess of Ségur; they had memorized by heart many passages from these authors. In the glass-fronted bookcase in the dining room stood the many volumes of the Nelson series, with white dust jackets and green bindings: Paul Claudel, Jules Sandeau, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo, Pierre Loti, Rudyard Kipling, and all of Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, the Alsatian duo. For the sentimental young Maurice, “the height of happiness,” as he was later to confess to an actress in one of his films, was to “read a book with the woman with whom [he had] fallen in love.”⁷

A familiarity with music, which also accompanied Rohmer throughout his life, came from one of his aunts, a former pianist who taught the young man to play the piano on the fifth floor of the house. When he discussed his childhood, Rohmer played down the extent of this musical education: “I learned the piano only vaguely, and with great difficulty; I didn’t get beyond the elementary stage. Even at twenty I couldn’t play with both hands! […] Moreover, I don’t have a very good ear. Nonetheless, I like music, and I like to learn how it is made.”⁸

Finally, both Maurice and René Schérer had a talent for drawing and painting. “He was very good at portraits,” René says, “at that time he had a better mastery of the techniques of watercolor and oil than I did.”⁹ In the house in Tulle, there are still many drawings and small paintings, most of them made by René in the garden during vacations. Rohmer later wrote that he had approached painting through “schoolbooks that reproduced the paintings in black and white. […] I enjoyed recopying in watercolors the works of Raphael and Rembrandt that I admired (on larger surfaces, and thanks to the system of gridding, which allowed relative exactitude).”¹⁰

However, the future Rohmer’s initial passion was undeniably the theater. First of all, there was the municipal theater, which was unusual with its large sculpted-wood doors, its bright colors, and its architecture in the Moorish style, which the Schérer brothers attended during the Baret tours that brought the Paris repertoire to the provinces. There were also the shows that Maurice himself produced very early on. At the Lycée Edmond-Perrier, with the help of the Latin professor, M. Margaux, he translated, adapted, produced, and acted, along with a few friends, Virgil’s first Eclogue. Maurice, wearing a tunic, played Meliboeus, already taking on “a shepherd’s air.”¹¹ Then he produced George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which he was seen smoking a pipe with his younger brother, while the latter’s first words were “We need two rooms.” Then came Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, retranslated and adapted with the German professor. In each case, these end-of-the-year shows met with a clear success, as did the recitations Maurice declaimed before an admiring audience: whole speeches from Racine, Molière, and Corneille learned by heart. With his cousins, he produced La Farce de Maître Pathelin, which he himself adapted from the octosyllabic verses of the late medieval play. At the age of fourteen, he made some of the costumes and stage settings and, according to his brother, proved to be “very punctilious regarding the production.”¹² The inspiration derived from the Middle Ages was decisive and common to the Schérer brothers; it may have been connected with the motifs of the wallpaper of the staircase in the family home, which depicted medieval knights. These theatrical productions presented in the house’s attic reached their high point the following year, 1935, with Le Neveu du Baron de Crac, adapted from the eponymous novel published by Pierre Henri Cami in 1927. All this was taken very seriously; there were many and assiduous rehearsals and strict and carefully thought-out stage directions: Maurice discovered an original vocation as a director. He adored this little theater of his own creation.

The only art that hardly influenced the young man at all was film. His parents disliked and mistrusted it. Tulle’s cinemas were few in number and attracted small or unsavory audiences, and Rohmer, much later, could remember only three films that played a role in his childhood:

I discovered the cinema very late. My parents did not take me there. The very first time I saw films was on the square in Tulle, little silent films projected with a device cranked by hand! As for fictional films, when I was ten years old the whole family went to see Ben Hur, with Ramón Novarro, at the end of the silent film era. I liked it, but I wasn’t enthusiastic. A short time afterward, we went to see a sound film, L’Aiglon, because my parents admired Edmond Rostand. With my father, I must have also seen Tartarin de Tarascon, which I didn’t like at all. I also remember that I had to write a composition in high school on the q...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• The Mysteries of “le grand Momo”
• 1. Maurice Schérer’s Youth: 1920–1945
• 2. From Schérer to Rohmer: 1945–1957
• 3. Under the Sign of Leo: 1959–1962
• 4. Under the Sign of Cahiers: 1957–1963
• 5. The Laboratory Period: 1963–1970
• 6. Four Moral Tales: 1966–1972
• 7. On Germany and the Pleasure of Teaching: 1969–1994
• 8. In Pursuit of Perceval: 1978–1979
• 9. Six Comedies and Proverbs: 1980–1986
• 10. The Rohmer of the Cities and the Rohmer of the Countryside: 1973–1995
• 11. In the Rhythm of the Seasons: 1989–1998
• 12. Filming History: 1998–2004
• 13. A Tale of Winter: 2006–2007
• 14. In Pain: 2001–2010
• Notes
• Index
• Illustrations