Georges Darien

Georges Darien was the pen name of Georges Hippolyte Adrien, a French writer born in Paris in 1862 and dead there in 1921. He is generally described as a novelist, dramatist, and polemicist, and his work is closely linked with anarchist ideas and a fierce distrust of authority.

He is best known today for Le Voleur (The Thief), but his writing ranged across novels, pamphlets, and plays. Readers often remember him for the energy of his attacks on bourgeois respectability, nationalism, and the brutality of military life; Biribi, his anti-militarist novel, is one of the clearest examples of that edge.

Though never a conventional literary figure, Darien kept a lasting reputation as an angry, original voice of revolt. His books fell in and out of view over the years, yet they continued to attract later writers and readers interested in satire, dissent, and the outsider tradition in French literature.