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Carmen

Prosper Mérimée

Paris, 1845

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Literary Classic

Novella
Romanticism

What It’s About

An Inadvertent Success

In societies where men control most aspects of life by default, many people see a woman’s control of her sexuality as a threat to the established order. While Prosper Mérimée was a chauvinist who was comfortable with male dominance in 19th century France, he inadvertently created a compelling and complex female character. Carmen controls her environment, goes where she wants with whom she wants. She even chooses, in the end, to die free rather than live under a man’s rule. In trying to create a vamp or femme fatale, Mérimée also wrote about a fascinating proto-feminist heroine who remains fresh more than 150 years later.

Take-Aways

Carmen epitomizes the femme fatale, who dooms and ruins righteous men.
While on a research trip, the narrator meets the bandit José Navarro in the Andalusian mountains, only to see him again in a prison cell awaiting execution a few months later. José tells him his life story, how he fell in love with the gypsy Carmen, forfeited his military career and joined a gang of smugglers. When Carmen lost interest in him and sought out other men, he chose to kill her rather than let her free.
Prosper Mérimée created Carmen in 1845. But Georges Bizet’s opera, which premiered in 1875, made her world-famous.

About the Author

Prosper Mérimée was born on September 28, 1803, in Paris. The son of painters, he developed a passion for literature and foreign languages early on. He studied law to become a royal administrator, but his interests soon took him elsewhere: He actively sought out literary circles, meeting, among others, Stendhal and Victor Hugo. Mérimée started his own literary career by publishing Théâtre de Clara Gazul, a purported commentary of theater and life by a Spanish actress. In 1827, he published a made-up collection of romantic Illyrian folk songs and poems under yet another pseudonym. He attained his literary breakthrough by adopting the novella, a new literary genre that suited his talents best: Between 1829 and 1847 he published 25 stories, including Mateo Falcone (1829), La Vénus d’Ille (1837), Colomba (1841) and, of course, Carmen (1847). Mérimée never married, but had several mistresses and frequented prostitutes. Some of his relationships with women gravely hurt his pride. In 1833, for example, a short liaison with the writer George Sand ended badly by her commenting to a girlfriend “I had Mérimée last night, and it wasn’t much.” The girlfriend then spread this gossip until much of literary Paris was chuckling about it. A year later, Mérimée was named Inspector-General of Historical Monuments, a position he kept until 1860. His diligent endeavor to list, restore and protect the architectural heritage of France allowed him to travel freely at the government’s expense, working on travel writing and conducting scholarly work for archeological and historical journals. After Napoleon III grabbed power, his friendship with the new emperor’s Spanish wife came in handy, and he was even promoted to Senator of the Empire in 1853. During his last years he dedicated most of his time to translating and promoting Russian literature in France. The fall of the Empire after the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, as well as the imperial family’s exile to England, threw Mérimée into deep despair. He died a few months later in Cannes, on September 23, 1870.