Jean Danielrops

Vocation

French writer and historian whose real name was Henri Petiot. Daniel Rops has written novels and works of religious history. He was a professor of history in Chambéry, then in Amiens and finally in Paris. In the late 1920s he began his literary career with an essay, Notre inquiétude (Our Anxiety, 1926), a novel, L'âme obscure (The Dark Soul, 1929), and several articles in journals such as Correspondent, Notre Temps and La Revue des vivants. Starting in 1931 he wrote mostly about Catholicism, advised by Gabriel Marcel with whom he shared membership of the Ordre Nouveau. He helped disseminate its ideas in books in which it is often difficult to distinguish his personal reflections from the doctrines of the movement he had attached himself to, and which make him a leading representative of the intellectual ferment among non-conformists in the 1930s: Le Monde sans âme (The World without a Soul), Les annés tournantes, Eléments de notre destin. From 1957 to 1963 was one of the 50 governors of the European Foundation of Culture founded by Denis de Rougemont. In 1955, he was elected to the Académie française. He died 27 July 1965. Link to Wikipedia biography