author
Gabriel Tristan Franconi
1887–1918
A French poet and novelist of Swiss origin, he belonged to the restless literary world of early 20th-century Paris before dying in World War I at just 31. His work carries the energy of a young writer shaped by both avant-garde circles and the violence of his time.
1 Audiobook
Un tel de l'armée française
by Gabriel Tristan Franconi
About the author
Born in Paris on May 17, 1887, Gabriel-Tristan Franconi was a Swiss-born writer and poet who later became a naturalized French citizen. He moved in lively literary circles in the years before World War I and was associated with the small-review culture that helped define the period's experimental writing.
Franconi wrote poetry as well as fiction, and he is remembered in part for Un tel de l'armée française, a wartime novel now available through Project Gutenberg. His life was cut short during the war: he was killed on July 23, 1918, in the Somme, and is counted among the French writers who died in service.
Because he died so young, his reputation rests less on a large body of work than on the promise and intensity of what he left behind. For listeners interested in overlooked voices from the early 1900s, Franconi offers a glimpse of a literary generation interrupted by war.