Queer Places:
Library Pierre Fanlac, 12 Av. Georges Pompidou, 24000 Périgueux, France
Domme Cemetery
Domme, Departement de la Dordogne, Aquitaine, France
François Augiéras ( July 18, 1925 – December 13, 1971 ) was a French writer.
His novels deal with incest, homosexuality, sadism and even bestiality.[1] They also describe his trips to North Africa and Greece.[1]
André Gide acted as one of his mentors.[1]
François Augiéras was the son of Pierre Augiéras, a renowned French pianist, and his mother was a porcelain painter of Polish origin. Pierre Augiéras, who had settled in the United States for professional reasons, died of appendicitis. His son was born two months later. Mother and child moved to France a few months after birth. François Augiéras spent his childhood first in Paris, which he found sinister and where he studied at the Collège Stanislas. They then moved to Périgueux when he was eight years old. At the age of thirteen, at the municipal library, he discovered André Gide, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Rimbaud. Attracted by art, he left school at the age of thirteen to take drawing classes. In 1941, he joined one of the youth movements that proliferated under the Vichy regime, but in 1942 he broke away to become an actor in a traveling theater. In 1944, he enlisted at the fleet depot in Toulon, then moved to Algeria. He hardly lingers in Algiers, in a hurry to go to the South, which he perceived to be his real country, and where he joined his uncle Marcel Augiéras, a retired colonial soldier, who lived in El Goléa, in the Sahara. During his stay in the Sahara, François Augiéras was sexually abused by his uncle, discovering on this occasion his own homosexual inclinations. Augiéras was inspired by this episode to write in 1949, Le Vieillard et l'Enfant, which he published on his own account under the pseudonym Abdallah Chaamba. The book caught the attention of André Gide who, a few months before his death, met the young writer after the latter had sent him two letters. Augiéras later described a Gide obviously moved by his meeting with him, and imagined himself as the "last love" of the great writer. Le Vieillard et l'Enfant was republished in 1954 by Éditions de Minuit and a rumor claimed that "Abdallah Chaamba" was a posthumous pseudonym of Gide. Lonely and revolted, Augiéras multiplied his travels, traveling through Algeria and Greece, and retreating to Mount Athos. In 1957-1958, he participated in the magazine Structure, directed by Pierre Renaud in Paris, then joined a company of meharists from southern Algeria. His books were inspired by his eventful life: he himself wrote: "I have accepted – or called – dangerous adventures, always with this ulterior motive: it will become books! » With a pantheistic temperament, Augiéras openly evoked in his writings the sexual attraction both for boys and young girls, but also for animals. In The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the only one of his works that is not directly autobiographical, it addressed the theme of pedophilia. In 1960, he married his cousin Viviane de La Ville de Rigné, but their union did not last and was officially dissolved nine years later. In 1964, L'Apprenti sorcier was published without an author's name by Julliard, a little-known, wild text of unusual strength, where a teenager maintains masochistic relations with the priest with whom he is placed, then lives a love story with a young boy. In 1967, Augiéras completed the first book he signed with his real name, Une adolescence au temps du Maréchal et de multiples aventures. Wanderings, precariousness, extreme loneliness aggravate his state of health. Stays at the hospital of Périgueux follow one another. At the end of the 1960s, he resided for a time in the caves of Domme to escape the living conditions in the hospices, and wrote there on school notebooks. His book Domme ou l'Essai d'occupation, which he failed to get published during his lifetime, was inspired by his life in the caves. Undermined by poverty and malnutrition, prematurely aged by his living conditions, he moved into a nursing home near Brantôme (Dordogne), then into a hospice for the destitute in Montignac. A Journey to Mount Athos was published in 1970. Suffering from heart disease, François Augiéras died on December 13, 1971 at the hospital of Périgueux. He was buried in Domme on the 18th. One of his few friends, the teacher Paul Placet, then worked to publicize Augiéras' work by organizing exhibitions of his paintings and distributing his manuscripts. Several works by François Augiéras, including collections of correspondence, were published posthumously. In addition to a literary work, he left a set of paintings and drawings, still little known. One of his biographers, Serge Sanchez, describes Augiéras' literary work as "a spiritual fresco that takes root in his very life." François Augiéras gives his name to the literary prize of the Grand Périgueux, the Prix Augiéras, which is awarded each year as part of the Salon du Livre de Champcevinel, Livre en Fête, since 2010. In 2001, Marc Monnier realized at the request of Xavier Darcos, then mayor of Périgueux and senator of Aquitaine, a sculpture in tribute to François Augiéras. Placed in the grounds of the Pierre Fanlac media library, it was restored and moved more prominently in the enclosure in 2018. It represents an abstract interweaving of letters. In 2021, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death, the Office of Culture of Domme offers a tribute to Sarlat and Domme, then to Montignac and Les Eyzies, with exhibitions events and debates on his work. The same year a special issue of the magazine Raskar Kapac appeared as well as an essay by Bernard Duvert.
My published books:
